Eidolon
by Silver Pard
Summary: The afterlife is not fun and games.
1. Cocytus

**(Cocytus)**

It began with blood. Everything does. For you it began with your hometown, for others it began with a baby and its mother dying with blood still wet on her thighs, and for maybe the few more that know anything it began with a frozen something found by scientists who didn't know better. You're all wrong. This is an ancient thing, far older than that. It has nothing to do with you, with us. But it got us anyway, drew all of us together in one cosmic swoop of the net, all these strangers becoming tangled in each other's lives.

It has everything to do with you, with us.

What are you doing? Come, what are you doing traveling, paying bills, playing games, waiting for the phone to ring – acting like this is an ordinary day? This is the anniversary, come join the masquerade, we're waiting.

Come and follow us. Leave it all behind for a while, you won't need it. Walk with us as we've walked beside you; forget those mortal things that have no meaning and remember.

Don't turn away! Why so bitter? Because no one else sees the significance? Everyone forgets; that's the way of it – isn't this proof for you that time is merciful, rather than the opposite? Everyone forgets. Except for you, of course. You, who's healed mind is cursed with a memory that calls up specific events with ease, as merciless as the truth and as real as death.

Remember the way the flames felt on the day your world blew apart around you like a house of cards, the sheer heat of them on your skin? Remember how it sounded, it smelled, it tasted, remember that crackling noise of human flesh being reduced to charcoal around you, the screams of those refusing to go quietly into the night, the soft whisper of blade and blood?

Remember the edge of the scalpel, the glint of light on its fine edge, the sour fear it evoked that you could taste in your mouth? Remember how afraid you were that your skin had become glass and a breath too deep, too long would shatter you into a thousand pieces, tiny shards of you too small to gather together again, too large to let you disintegrate into oblivion?

Remember the sound of bullets tearing through flesh, the sight of blood arcing in the air, carmine droplets showering across your face and into your hazy mako-drugged eyes?

Remember that sound, of sword sheathing itself in her flesh? The way her hands fell to her sides, her fingers unlacing as they fell, the way the ribbon fluttered loose from her hair in absurd synchronization, and the materia falling against the altar, bouncing with musical little chimes that struck you to the quick?

Remember his face as your own blade struck down, again and again and again, the gasping, sucking sound of pulling it free of the flesh to hit back once more, just once more, arterial blood spraying into your face and the look in his eyes as they widened with – ah, no.

Torture? No. In your heart you know this is justice. You're the _lucky_ one, after all. You're still alive.

* * *

What is it like, being dead? Take a guess.

* * *

You know me, I think. Zack Fair, at your service. Or are you at mine?

Ah, so you do know me. Ready? Let's walk, you and I. There are a thousand places to visit, a hundred lives to examine, so many things to regret.

Where to begin?

Here. The beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, as Valentine might philosophise. My death. Our deaths.

When I died, I turned into a mirror. The moment that fatal bullet blew out the back of my head, I became glass, and I was trapped inside, an image of past time, of an era now ended. I saw Cloud, and I watched as he reached inside the mirror and drew out my crystalline heart. He held my heart in his hand and he unlocked his chest with a key that became a name, and within the cage of his ribs his own heart was made of mythril and mist and lightning lit up its centre with sorrow and rage. A tiny key made of a wing tied to a chain unlocked the mythril and mist heart, and he placed mine inside it, where it thumped and cried out to me as he locked it away with the wing key and sealed up his chest once more with the key that was a name.

I didn't see any of that, however. The moment he took my heart from me the mirror exploded into a hundred thousand shards and became a suit of armour, and in every plane I saw my face.

When I woke again, I was part of this thin existence, this stretched place of memories and Lifestream, this sheer reality between waking and the Promised Land, as close to living as death will allow.

Sephiroth told me that when he died – the first time – he drowned in a sea of tears. There was a chain of ink and black silk around his left ankle, tying him down, and a chain of mist and silver looped around his right arm that sang in metallic voices, and as he kicked and thrashed trying to get the surface he turned the sea of tears into blood. The blood became a bridge and he walked across it until he reached a white shore, where his chains tugged him towards two different paths – one leading down a bright path of scouring flame, and the other leading down a path of shadow and thorns. He chose – or perhaps he didn't, what do I know – the path of shadow and thorns, looping the singing chain around his body so that he would not forget, and he walked and walked, leaving blood-streaked crystal tears to mark his way back until the two paths combined once more. In a clearing of thorn and flame he met a boy with scars on his knees that screamed and cried and begged him to go away but he was the first being Sephiroth had seen for what felt like eternities and he wrapped his arms around him and he would not let go. The boy slipped through his fingers like dreams, and he looped the singing chain of mist and silver around him so that neither of them could run far enough to leave the other behind.

When he woke again, he had not lost the chains as I had stopped being the mirror, and he could not stay still and rest because they were both tugging him in different directions; he followed the ink and silk chain while holding tight to the singing one, and he couldn't remember why.

Aerith told me that when she died two gigantic white wings burst from her back and she flew high and far into the sky, until the Planet became the size of a materia that she cupped in her hands. She breathed hard into it so that it became a brilliant green and she strung it around her neck where it sang in a million voices that made her shrink back into her old skin, which rippled and shone like the Lifestream. The million voices became a ribbon that led her through the tracery of fine veins in the underside of a leaf that became a maze and in its centre, she said, she saw my back, but I slid into my shadow as she reached for me, and we tumbled over and over through a colourless sky until we landed in a field of white and yellow flowers.

Those were the paths we took to the other side of life.

* * *

The flowers still bloom in the church, and hidden among them tiny mementoes, little snapshots of affection – tattered bows and ribbons, tiny cards curling and browning with age, illegible script smudged with rain and time declaring they'll remember her forever, a washed out yellow flower, carefully pressed and trapped in plastic like a fly in amber. He keeps returning here (—Criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, eh?

—Hush, Zack, Aerith says sharply, elbowing me in the ribs.)

He's closest to us here, to Aerith specifically, can almost feel her presence hovering at his side, hear her voice in his ear. It's Aerith Cloud calls for, Aerith's conversations he hears and recalls, but it's Sephiroth over there that stands so often at his shoulder, watching over his every little action with hate or pity or disinterest or nothing at all, his face is that hard to read. (—I don't hate him, Sephiroth says simply. He promptly ruins the redemptive moment by adding pensively, —Not right now, anyway. Aerith and I meet gazes and silently agree to pretend the last statement wasn't made.

—He hates you, I tell him quietly. —You broke him.

He smiles at me as if I haven't just told him he's destroyed a man. —I know, he says. —I happen to think I like him better broken.)

It might be hate or anger or fear or simply memory that makes Cloud think of – and therefore call to – Sephiroth so often, but it's still a call, and it pulls Seph to him, so strong its literally impossible for him to stay away. It hardly matters, because Sephiroth delights in haunting him. He's learnt that his touch will bring memories and nightmares, brief flashes of rapid-fire images that make Cloud reel away and shudder; so at odd moments he'll brush outstretched fingers across Cloud's face, his shoulder, his throat, the delicate stud in his ear, the nape of his neck. His touch is a poison that seeps through Cloud's skin and into his heart and mind, corroding his thoughts with memories he's tried to lock away.

(He's the oldest of us, but the delight he finds in this petty cruelty… He wasn't always like this. His mind… let's just say it's never going to be the same again.)

Every night he leaves us to watch Cloud sleep, sometimes filled with fury at a pulse taken for granted, sometimes just hurting and desperate and so tired of being nothing. It's being nothing he can't stand most of all, because for so long he was so many people's everything; he just can't stand being forgotten so easily. So he clings to Cloud, who can't let him go, and even when he wants to he can't leave. He's realised at last that the puppet strings between them can go both ways.

_Why should you live? Why should _you_ live?_

For as long as Cloud lives, Sephiroth will be there, watching him take every breath.

(—Immortality at last, Sephiroth says dryly, a flash of that rare morbid humour we all thought lost with him so long ago)

It's been a year since Sephiroth died for a second time, since Meteor fell, since what could have been the end of the world. A year, and everything and nothing has changed.

* * *

About Sephiroth. Let me try and explain.

No, that will turn out as badly as everything else. We'll muddle through an explanation somehow.

Where to begin? There is a choice you make, when you die. There are as many Promised Lands, as many afterlives and as many ways to get there as there are people, and everybody makes their own. Some won't want to stay here, will join the Lifestream and become part of everything new – the grass, the earth, the new creatures, everything, and they'll leave all they were behind and never know to miss it. Some people will find their Promised Land, some people will become what you call ghosts; some will walk dark places few have the courage or the conviction to follow. And sometimes it's not really our choice at all, but yours, because you need us so.

For example: Aerith told me once of a little girl she saw in the street, watching her mother. But the girl was dead, and the glimpse of her squeezed her mother's heart in an iron fist, tore at her throat with a gasp that formed her daughter's name. _Have you come for me?_ her mother asked in her mind, and Aerith felt the longing that swept through her, a tide that would never go out.

But then she could no longer see the child, and while her mother-heart insisted she was still there, her mind was already forming excuses – _I did not see my dead daughter waiting for me on that street corner. My mind has tricked my eyes, my baby girl is dead. There is no such thing as ghosts. I do not _want_ to see her. I am over it._

There are as many Promised Lands as there are people; it all depends on the point of view. Do you understand this?

Let me be blunt. Something went wrong with Sephiroth when he made his crossing, when he took the path from life to what is beyond life. If it hadn't been for Jenova, I don't think he'd be here. The Sephiroth I knew would never have chosen this place; he wasn't the type of person to tie himself uselessly to the living, to want to spend his time watching what he could not change. There is enough left of what he was for him to know this place is wrong for him, but not enough to know where exactly he was supposed to go.

That's why he wore (wears) the chains. One chain was for Cloud, and he made it himself out of guilt and need and a strand of his own hair so that it was a part of him and he couldn't loosen it if he tried. The other chain was of Jenova's making, though he placed it upon himself by his own free will. They tied him to the living, but in two utterly different ways, and so he split in two.

What I like to call The Real Sephiroth could sometimes be seen here, a grave, sombre apparition that couldn't stay in any one place for long, trapped in this in-between place. He couldn't leave one way or the other, and he appeared here and there but most particularly where and when Cloud needed him most.

The image of Sephiroth, the mockery of his former self, was Jenova's. He was none of our concern – he belonged to the living world, and that was their problem. (And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.)

We all thought… well, _I _thought that when the body died, the spirit would be whole again.

Hah, too bloody optimistic a belief by far. Sephiroth's second crossing was even worse that his first. I don't know what happened, because Sephiroth has never been able to tell us, never had enough coherence, but what was left after the end was neither The Real Sephiroth nor the Jenovan mockery. It's the greatest mystery of the afterlife – where is The Real Sephiroth, when will he be back… or is the shattered person Aerith and I see every day the real Sephiroth, the sum total of his devastating experience? Did Jenova's puppet meld with the General at his second (true?) death? Is the fucked up thing I spend half my time pitying and half my time fearing actually the genuine article?

Once upon a time, Sephiroth had a brilliant mind. Now he's got fractured little shards of thought that are not only completely incompatible at times but when in direct contradiction also actively fight like rabid Turks over the last cup of coffee. In three minds about absolutely everything, he walks the fine line between each warring set of ideas like a drunk taking a sobriety test.

Which is to say, he's a total lunatic. Give it five minutes, you'll see that.

So, now that you know that, where do we go from here?

The beginning. Or what was _our_ beginning, anyway. But what _was_ the start? In Wutai, where I saw a man-monster crush a nation and became friends with him anyway? When I met Cloud, who was to become the saviour of the world? When Sephiroth decided pyromania was the way to go? When I died and Cloud became something other than Cloud? When we all met up again? Where do you want me to start? Everything is so messed up.

How about this – we don't talk about it at all. How's that?

* * *

Wutai is harsh and beautiful. I remember thinking that when I was there. Wutai is harsh and beautiful, and she taught this to her people. They have a deep respect for the land, for the land is powerful and before her they are nothing. Wutai teaches her people to be proud, to be harsh, to never give up, because you could never survive otherwise. Wutai teaches pleasure in simple things – to find beauty in the temporary and peace in the eternal. I remember thinking how much I wanted to see things the way the people of Wutai did, how much I wanted to understand.

I felt ashamed not to know it, and then I felt ashamed to think how much I envied the enemy. What the hell, I was very young. I'm still very young.

I'd been in Wutai about a month by then, and we stood on sentry duty, my friend and I, arguing good-naturedly over just how useless the new C.O was and which conspiracy theories were so ridiculous they might just be true and that old soldier complaint, bureaucracy. He was older than I was, at least twice my age, and had taken it upon himself to show me the ropes, to be someone to watch my back (you're supposed to be fourteen before you can join the army, but the war had been going on for a long time and nobody particularly cared about how old you were any more so long as you could hold a gun). He talked a little of his wife back in Midgar, and how he was going to get leave soon. When the topics tailed off, we stood watching our breath crystallise in the air, and I looked up at the stars, so bright and clear, sucking in cold air so deeply my throat burned in time with my pulse and my lungs ached and every inhale sounded like a gasp stolen from a dying man.

"Gonna snow tonight," my friend said. He'd been in Wutai for a long time, almost since the war began, and knew the warning signals of a Wutai winter. "Tonight or tomorrow."

(It did. More snow than I'd ever seen in my life before – trees surround Gongaga, sheltering us from the cold north winds, and beyond the jungle the plains are wide and flat and the weather temperate. It covered my friend's body until he was nothing more than an odd hump in the snow, filled in the last footprints he'd ever make, covered over the red stains with treacherous white. When I brushed it away his skin was blue and his features edged with rime. His dog-tags stuck to his flesh and when I hung them with the others gathered strips of frozen skin hung down like ribbons.

There were so many battles in the next months the letter of condolence didn't get sent out until half a year after his death.)

I wasn't paying any attention anyway. I was thinking about how I never praised my mom's cooking, about how much I should have. I was thinking about the child-general with his silver hair, and how that would be pure white surrounded by snow, and of his cold green eyes, and how he wasn't a child any more and probably never had been.

I was cursing myself for a fool for liking him anyway, even after I'd seen what he did to the POWs, and trying to be his friend, and joining the army just to see if he really was as he had appeared on television so many years ago. He had been fourteen, fifteen (little more than a child! My mother had wept, although he was almost twice as old as I was then, and the few seconds of shaky footage of him on the battlefield was enough to still that cry). I was thinking how he'd seemed poised and graceful even then, walking the blurred line between adolescence and adulthood, and I envied it now that I had reached that awkward period myself.

I was thinking of the battle that was sure to arrive the next day, and wondering if tomorrow would be It.

I was feeling I might like to die, because at the moment my throat was killing me, and I was thinking how much Wutai was like her people, or maybe how much her people had learnt from her – to be harsh and beautiful, death or victory, always, and no in-betweens.

"I give up," my friend said with mock-irritation. "Don't think too hard Spinifex, you might strain something." He waved as he walked away, and I made a mental note to apologise the next day for being a terrible, neglectful friend, when I had time, when I saw him again.

I look for him sometimes, when Aerith has gone to the fields and Sephiroth is standing sentry, tapping his fingers against Cloud's forehead and thinking of ways to kill him, but the Lifestream is a vast place, and who's to say my friend has the same deal I do?

Maybe he's gone. Maybe his spirit has already let go of everything, become part of something new, is now part of the grass and the flowers and the water and the newborn creatures. I don't know. I think maybe he has.

It keeps me busy. It keeps me from thinking how tired Aerith's eyes are when she hugs Tifa at night and tells her not to cry. It keeps me from thinking about the sneer on Sephiroth's face when he looks at the blind masses walking the streets. It keeps me from thinking about how much I hate Cloud's pilgrimages to the bare patch of earth where my sword, rust-touched and old and no longer the blade I treasured, is sheathed in the dirt.

(And sometimes I want to ask, the hell do you think you are, keeping us here?)

* * *

This is the way to deal with horror, with war. You laugh, you play games, you kiss pretty girls, and you do more than kiss if they'll let you.

You don't hold your feelings tight against your chest, wrapping yourself in the image of the perfect soldier, unable to reach out, unable to share, just burying them deep and pretending they never existed.

You don't wind yourself tight like a clockwork toy, because eventually you'll break.

Ah, Nibelheim.

(Fire, fire everywhere, and nowhere near a shrink.)

* * *

I remember Nibelheim like this. My lip was bleeding, I bit it through when I left the Mansion and saw what my best friend had done. I could feel the heat of the flames on my skin, through my boots. I saw Cloud outside of his mother's house, and I remember looking inside and not wanting to, seeing his mother – couldn't be anybody else, with that hair – staring at me with blank, accusing eyes. There was blood on her skin, and her dress caught fire as I watched, I saw the flames lap at her, at her skin, her face, her _face_-

I remember Cloud said a name (Se…phi…roth…) brokenly, in pieces, like it was made up of pieces of bone he had to spit out or he'd choke. I remember wondering why he was there, because he'd been guarding the entrance to the basement for as long as Sephiroth had been down there.

Did he see the insanity in Sephiroth's eyes as he left the basement and run ahead to try and reach his mother first? Did he trail after him obediently, only to watch in horror as he cut down the first person to ask him if he was all right? Did he abandon his watch outside the basement and go to visit his mother, having decided that Sephiroth had been down there a week already with no sign of moving, nobody would notice if he wasn't around for a few hours? Was he being fussed over by her when Sephiroth stormed in with fire in his eyes and the Masamune in his hands? But then, how did he end up outside?

I never asked. You don't get all the answers coming here. All the present is open to us, but the past is closed, and the future as obscure to us as to anyone still living.

I knelt down beside him, and I was grateful he didn't seem to see me, that he kept calling Sephiroth's name, choking on those syllables of bone, because otherwise I'd have had to tell him, "Your mother is dead". But maybe he already knew, and I hated myself for hoping that was true, that he'd seen it happen, just because it meant I wouldn't have to tell him. Then I caught sight of Sephiroth through a curtain of flame.

I remember that I left Cloud there and chased after him, too full of fury and hate to do anything else. I was arrogant, and I was a fool.

I remember looking Sephiroth in the face and thinking (...oh, god, I'm dead) I'd never seen anything quite so scary. I'd been his friend long enough that I'd forgotten what I thought I never would – that this man was not like me, like everybody else, that he was something far beyond us. I'd forgotten the Sephiroth I saw on the battlefield, I had forgotten that this was the same man who had torn through the Wutai army like a hurricane, like a reaper cutting down great swathes of wheat with a sharp scythe – because over time I had come to believe that I had no reason to fear him, that there would never be a situation where I faced the same thing.

I remember… that his blood on the Buster Sword was almost black. It was the first time I'd ever seen Sephiroth bleed, and I watched his blood trickle down the edge of the Buster Sword and I thought… I thought… (this can't be happening) that an era was over, that everything was over. I saw the Great Sephiroth bleed at the hands of an ordinary soldier. I saw him look like – for the first time truthfully, not because I liked him and he was my friend – a normal man. After my arrogance and my pride, to see him hurt by _Cloud_, just a normal guy, nothing special, a ShinRa grunt (a wolf that had been pretending to be a dog) … I almost wanted… no, I lie, I _did_ want to see him turn around and fling him aside as easily as he did me. I wanted to see him toss Cloud around like he was toy, pitch _him_ into walls hard enough to make a dent because how could I have done nothing, and Cloud everything? How could it have been so easy for him to bat me aside like an irritating insect… but so hard for him to even speak when Cloud got one good hit in? How could it have been so goddamn easy for Cloud to do what he did, when I had failed?

(—What you are failing to take into account, _Fair_, Sephiroth says in the iciest tone I have ever heard from him, sane or insane, though whether it's because of the memory or because of what I've just been saying I don't know, —Is that it was Cloud Strife's hometown I burnt to the ground, not yours. Naturally, he desired my end far more than you did. Not to mention _he_ was intelligent. He didn't give me a warning. It has nothing to do with mako or the absence thereof.)

That's why… I told Cloud to kill him. I wanted… Cloud… I wanted… to see you fail.

I've regretted that moment of thwarted pride for the rest of my life and beyond it, but that doesn't change anything, doesn't change the fact that when I saw him pin Cloud upon the Masamune like a butterfly some part of me, the SOLDIER part that was used to being considered above ordinary people and had come to believe its own hype, some part of me said _yes_.

(—_If it weren't for the lack of options_, The Real Sephiroth said to me very softly in a deadly voice when I told him this, and I remember how ashamed I was and how his eyes looked into me and saw filth, saw something so hideous he wouldn't even touch it with his boot —_I would never speak to you again._

I wouldn't have blamed him either, because when I think about it, _I _don't ever want to speak to me.)

I remember Zangan's face, etched with worry and determination, I remember watching him run past Cloud on the walkway like he didn't matter, scoop Tifa carefully into his arms and run back out. I remember cursing his name in my mind for weeks on end for leaving us.

I remember the end of my world like that.

Let's talk about Zangan for a moment, try and see it from his eyes.

You're a martial artist, a good one, a great one. You have one hundred and twenty-eight students across the world, from Midgar to Wutai. When the Great Sephiroth loses more than just a few screws, you try to help the people in the village, and that's well and good (except what did you help them to live for? They became the Black Cloaks after all). You don't go after him – you, a fighter with all your years and experience, the only person in the town with any real chance.

(Call yourself a warrior, old man? You stood by and you tried to save the townspeople… and then, after a SOLDIER had tried, after your fifteen year old pupil and a sixteen year old boy with no better training than any other ShinRa grunt tried, you abandoned those people like pieces of nothing and you came.

Were you afraid? Did you watch the way he carved up men, women, children with effortless, lazy flicks of that long sword? Were you spellbound at how easily he reduced people to corpses? Did you tell yourself it was not fear but caution that stayed your hands and your feet?)

You enter the reactor. There are three people. A boy you don't know, a girl you do, a SOLDIER you told to kill Sephiroth (well, that certainly taught me the danger of arrogance.)

Three people. The boy is closest, the boy who did what you could not, what you – martial arts master, with pupils from Midgar to Wutai – should have done. You don't know that, of course – you weren't there. He's badly wounded, possibly dying.

Perhaps you were jealous of this boy? Of the feat of strength you could not perform? Or perhaps it was simply the way he was lying, crumpled like a marionette with the strings cut, and the warrior part of your brain saw how he lay, saw the blood and the paleness of his skin and said, _he won't live_ and the human part of you said, _I don't know this boy_.

Just past him is a girl, a girl you have trained and cared for carved up like a turkey.

Was that all that saved her from the fate that awaited the other survivors of Nibelheim? That she was your pupil? Did your emotions override your sense, as we are taught never to allow them to do? He cut her open without even _thinking_ about; I watched her skin, her flesh peel apart and unfold like a red flower to reveal bone beneath – did you think she would _live_? Where was the warrior part of your brain then?

(I wonder sometimes if he meant her to live. I've seen the Masamune cut through bone as if it were butter. I've seen him carve people up like a fucking artist. If he wanted somebody dead, they died. Or maybe it was all a game: if you die, well that's fine; if you have enough strength to force yourself to live, you probably deserve to. Maybe he was playing with his puppet even then, watching his responses like observing a lab rat.

Maybe he just didn't give a fuck.)

Furthest from you there is a man badly wounded, but infused with mako that will make short work of those injuries.

(I would have recovered. A matter of days, a week, I would have recovered. Hell, give me a few hours or a Cure spell – I'd be shamed if Cloud could do something I couldn't, a frickin' First Class and all. I could have gone back. _I_ would have gone back.)

You have five minutes, possibly less.

How do you decide, in a situation like that, just who you should save?

Did he know what he was leaving us to? Even not knowing, was he consumed so utterly by the thought of his prize pupil he could spare none for us? He left her Midgar the moment he got there. Why did he not come back, if only to assuage his conscience?

But he didn't come back.

(Am I being unfair? Well just what the fuck did you expect? The blame has got to go somewhere, and not all the guilt in this caper can be mine.)

Don't think I didn't love Cloud. I died for him, something you'll hear everybody talk about but rarely do. I died for him and that wasn't a mistake, there was never another choice, no matter how selfish I sometimes feel. And okay, so wishing him impalement wasn't exactly generous of spirit, but don't think I wouldn't take that thought back if I could. Don't think I haven't cursed myself over and over for succumbing to such human egotism.

Don't think I stand here and wish Cloud ill. Don't think I wouldn't do it all over again if I could.

But don't think I'm some sort of saint, either. I was just a normal guy who got messed up in things way beyond my understanding, and I did the best I could.

How _dare _you judge me?

(Se...phi...roth...) I heard that beneath Cloud's tears, beneath his hatred and fury. Little syllables of bone.

* * *

That was the end of my life; everything that followed was only the afterimage.

* * *

At fourteen Cloud Strife was small and skinny and pale, and I remember thinking he had the brightest, bluest eyes I'd ever seen without the help of mako. He had spirit then; he was like a colt just being broken in, and you could see it in his eyes that he was fighting the process every step of the way.

SOLDIER training did what it was supposed to do and beat him, broke him, reset him, smoothed away his edges; made him just like every other tiny cog in the great big ShinRa machine, and he learnt from it. He didn't get into fights. He didn't backchat officers. He didn't make waves. He slipped so effectively into the walls it's a wonder the Turks didn't realise what a rough diamond was beneath their noses and snap him up. He was a ferocious little wolf masquerading as a puppy dog, and nobody could see it but me.

(—_I_ saw, Sephiroth whispers, so low I almost think it's just my imagination. I'm not inclined to believe him. He's been obsessing over killing Cloud for years; that has _got_ to screw with the memory. I'm not saying Sephiroth doesn't recognise there's something special about Cloud – there has to be, for a lowly grunt to kill him. But I doubt he saw it at that time.)

He was utterly fearless, too focussed on his goal to care for much else. He had what Reno has, what any good Turk or SOLDIER has – every time you knocked him down, he just got right back up. No matter what you put him through, he kept going on, if he had to drag himself to do it. Determination like that is rare.

Which just makes all that happened to him all the more wasteful and stupid. The best I can describe it is… a kid. A kid with a new toy, one of those really expensive robotic new toys and this kid, he smashes it repeatedly against a wall until the toy is scattered into a thousand twisted pieces of electronic components. And then the kid puts it all back together again, but topsy-turvy, and the result is something that doesn't bear any resemblance at all to the original. Then the kid talks about this replacement as if it's something superior, because he rebuilt it with his own hands.

Wasteful. Stupid. Worthless.

The lab… the world was made of glass walls and glowing green and screams. No. Let's not talk about that. I can talk about what happened after, if I close my eyes and pretend it all happened to someone else. I can talk about what happened to Cloud, if I don't think about what it really meant. I can talk about those things and tell you with as much honesty as I possess about them, but don't ask me to walk that way again.

The Great Escape… yeah, sure I can tell you about that.

In the lab… in the lab, Cloud talked all the time. In the beginning. But never to me, as if I was part of something less real, as if _I_ were the hallucination, me and the lab, the glass walls and the mako stink and the measured tones of laboratory assistants. The only thing that was real was the voice nobody else could hear.

He'd call Sephiroth's name, and he'd curse and he'd snarl like some demented wolf and sometimes he'd just sit there and hum some really pretty songs I'd totally have liked if it weren't for the circumstances and occasionally he'd say some really weird shit. I hoped that last was the drugs they kept pumping into him, because the alternative was too ugly and painful.

(—_The thorn_, for a path of trouble and pain Cloud said once, I dunno, maybe three months in? Quite a while, anyway. So he says this right out of the blue, and then he stops and listens. He didn't move exactly, he still pressed his forehead to the glass, didn't even really move a muscle, but he didn't move a muscle in a way that made you think he was listening to something, like he'd been talking to someone and they were replying. Then he laughed, really softly, a bit like a single bloodstained feather floating in the air, it was that lost and that pathetic.

—_Ice, _he whispered, —for a path of sorrow and loneliness

—Liar, he said in response to the invisible conversationalist, but he said it in the sort of way that makes you think of old friends or new lovers, really fondly, like it was true and they both knew it but he didn't want to hurt the other person's feelings over it.

—_The wild ox_, for bravery and strength. I don't think – huh, you do, do you? But you're biased, aren't you?

—Stop it, I said to him, —Cloud, just stop it.

—_A Pine torch_, you will find out a secret. That sounds kinda cool, doesn't it? Do you want to know the secret when I find it? I'll tell you if you like. But you've got to tell me a secret too, because that's only fair, isn't it?

Stopitstopitstopit_please_

—_A Stone_, disappointment awaits you. I told you fortune telling with runes was stupid, I've already had every disappointment I could possibly get. Let's talk about something else. …Hey, Sephiroth?

Why didn't you talk to me? You were my friend; _why didn't you talk to me?_)

Then he stopped talking at all. I waited for months and months, because sometimes Cloud went deep inside and it was difficult for him to find his way back. I waited until the day something appeared inside Cloud's head and looked out and wrote in Wutai letters upon the glass that was the edge of the world, and I couldn't pretend anymore.

_Let's get out of here._

I was ready. But Hojo was ready too.

Sometimes I wonder if Hojo had something planned with our escape. With my death and Cloud's survival, and the Reunion starting the moment Cloud got locked up in the ShinRa tower, sometimes I wonder if the slimy bastard planned _everything_.

Then I try not to wonder at all because it makes my heart hurt and my stomach clench and my eyes sting. How could anybody, _anybody_ possibly be so sadistic, so cruel, so fucking monstrous –

Oh god, Cloud.

Ah, Sephiroth. Sephiroth.

God. Just… god.

(bullets and pain, and _forget him, he's a waste of bullets_ and my last thoughts were all full of relief, because it was all going to be okay for Cloud, he was going to be just fine, and what the hell did I know, and if I had I might just have taken the knife I kept in my boot and put it through his throat.)

I didn't think about it at all at the time – there were big _now_ things to worry about, like how to get Cloud out of there and how to get away and who gave a fuck if there were far less guards then I was expecting and they were so pathetically useless for people who had supposedly been guarding us for five goddamn years and

God. God, I saw the sky for the first time in five years. It was all clouds – boring, boring grey – with the sun fighting tooth and nail for exposure, lighting everything up for a few lame-ass seconds every ten minutes or so and it was the type of weather I always hated because you could never be quite sure of where it was gonna go, but oh god, it was so beautiful.

It was so goddamned beautiful and I was so happy I put Cloud down for a few moments and I just stared like some whacko, spinning around and around with my arms spread wide like I could hug the whole damn world until I fell over and just lay there, staring at the sky.

I lay there for all of ten seconds and then I got up, and I hauled Cloud onto his feet and dragged him along while he made little whimpering noises that never meant anything. Except that I wanted them to so badly, because they were the first noises Cloud had made for months upon months that weren't screams.

So there we were, free at last, Cloud drooling like my grandpa – he was senile, or at least, he was every time there were family gatherings, because nobody's going to slap a senile old man who doesn't know better than to make extremely inappropriate remarks, are they? – and I was shaking and shivering and Nibelheim was all around us, and for a moment I felt so hopeless I wanted to give up and just lie back down and stare at the sky until the bastards in white coats and blue suits came and dragged us back.

What would they have done if I had done that, I wonder?

Nibelheim. If it hadn't been for time constraints and the need to just get the hell out I'd have burned it down again, because building a perfect duplication of entire town, right down the fucking roof slates could be nothing good.

Nothing good at all.

If I knew what I was saving Cloud for, I might have given in to the urge to put my hands around his throat and strangle him. If I knew what was coming for him, would I have done that?

I think… I think I might have done.

The day I died, I thought everything would be worth it, all the pain and suffering and lost time, all the experiments and blood and hubris, it would all be worth it if only Cloud could live. I truly believed that. But if I had known what the life was to be that I saved him for, I would have killed him. Guilt and Destiny be damned, I would have killed him.

It hasn't been long since I died – not long enough to forget how it felt to lie on fresh-cut grass, to forget the best of the sunrises or the taste of a cold beer (nothing doing, naturally, but it's the _principle_ of the thing – what, you've let Seph convince you I don't have principles?) or the smell of Aerith's skin…

I was willing to lose all of these things. The smile Aerith would give me in greeting, the taste of my mom's cooking, the exhilaration of a good spar, every good and precious moment that I had and never recognised I lost in seconds to the feel of bullets in my flesh and blood thick on my skin, but I was willing to lose them all, to lose the most important battle of my life if only my friend, the last friend I had left, could live.

(I'll tell you a secret, yeah? Just between you and me. I'm not that selfless. There _are_ days when I wish it had been Cloud instead. Anybody who says they'd tell you something different is lying.

I'll say on those days that I'm thinking of Cloud, I'm thinking of the all the suffering Sephiroth put him through, of all the flaming hoops he had to jump, how he was torn apart. There are even days when I could tell you the reason was simply that I wanted so badly to be the one to cut Sephiroth down – I was owed that, _he_ was owed that – to die on a SOLDIER's blade. It's true enough. The best lies always are.

But I'll never tell anyone else that there are moments when I want to say _it should have been me, __**I**_ _should have lived._ I was the SOLDIER; I was the strength, the sword, the shield. _I _should have lived.

But I didn't and here I am and there he is, and I don't ask, why was your life worth preserving above my own? and I don't ask myself how much longer I might have lived if I'd left him behind, because I wouldn't be able to stand the answer.)

So long as Cloud was alive I was too, lingering in his wake like a second shadow (Or maybe a third or fourth. I think he collects us, you know. He certainly doesn't try to get rid of us) and I watched. I watched as out of guilt he made a space inside himself for me to reside in, a void so wide and deep there was room for everyone but my best friend. I knew he hollowed himself out too far; that the walls were thin and would crack and crumble and collapse, that the ceiling would fall in upon his poor muddled head, but I wanted to live – it still meant something to me (I was twenty-three, goddamn it, and nobody, whatever the fuck their occupation, wants to die at twenty-three) – so I stayed and let him hide behind me like a child I didn't know.

My friend was nothing but void, an empty space he filled with disparate memories and the thoughts of other people and different lives, as if Cloud Strife wasn't _good enough_. (Who the _fuck_ made him think that? Did he think I'd die for just anyone the way I did?

—Self-sacrifice has far too many drawbacks, Sephiroth drawls in a perfect imitation of Reno. —Which is why I get other people to sacrifice themselves for me instead. I can handle their deaths far better then they can deal with mine.)

I watched him fall to pieces and I realised nothing had been worth it at all. It would have been better for him to die. (But every time he comes to us we'll send him away – sorry friend, ain't your time yet, ain't ever your time)

It would've been better for him to die, but Cloud Strife was – _is_ – my friend. Friends don't give up on each other. _Ever_. Not friends like us, who lived for each other during the days that death would have been the best gift anyone could have given. I don't stay here because I have to; I stay here because I _chose_ to. Because some things make me think, hey, maybe he can make it. There is a _reason_ my buddy lived; it's not some capricious whim of fate that only he can beat Seph.

Half the time, I figure I'm lying.

But the other half… I see Sephiroth's face, I see him walking in Cloud's dreams and I know. I see his smile and I see the chain wound around his arm and I know that he knows.

(_You_, he has never said. _You and no other_. If I were still alive, would the privilege have been mine?)

* * *

When Sephiroth and I met again in this place, I tried to strangle him. Not the smartest thing to attempt in the _afterlife _on a man who'd tried to kill me the last time we saw each other. But what else could I do? He was the reason my world split apart at the seams, he was the reason Cloud spent five years of his life delirious or screaming, the reason I died on a cliff outside Midgar; just what did you think I was going to do, hug him?

After that though, it was almost like old times. Almost. He wasn't dead and he didn't belong and there was no control in when or where he showed up. But back then, split in two, when he _was_ here, he was Sephiroth.

When he made his rare visits, he and I used to vie silently for the opportunity to speak to Cloud, both of us hoping against hope that it would be on our shift that he had those brief periods of lucidity, was able to hear us and answer back. I had the advantage – he was hiding behind me, after all; in every gesture he thought without knowing it of me. Sephiroth could never stay long, and he was quiet and brief whenever he did manage to stay long enough and speak.

I saw him for perhaps two hours all put together during the 'Crisis' and I learnt more about him then than I did during the entirety of our friendship.

He was steady and determined and as constant as it was possible for him to be, guiding Cloud as well as he could down the best paths for him without ever letting him realise it, like all the best guides. It was his way of atonement, Aerith explained to me when she got here, satisfied, like a huge piece of a puzzle she'd been trying to figure out for ages had just gone and put itself in place.

He even managed to take control sometimes and he knew what had to be done in those moments. He influenced himself, he made the mockery of himself listen and react to what he said, so that he – well, not him _exactly_… you know what I mean, right? The… _image_, the cheap imitation remainder of him – ended up stripping Cloud of his armour, peeling back the layers of memory to get that sixteen year old that killed him, that had never felt a scalpel blade; he nudged Cloud this way and that towards enlightenment even as he tried to kill him.

—_Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Poli, poli, di umbuendo,_ I remember him whispering into Cloud's ear, weaving a shield for him with ancient words. I had to ask Aerith what they meant.

_Be patient and endure; some day this pain will be useful to you. Slowly, slowly, we will get there_

The problem was that taking his protection from him like that meant there was a very long period (for a living person, I mean) where Cloud stayed with us and refused to go back, helpless and confused.

You have to hurt to heal, Aerith explained to me when I cursed him for Cloud's condition, calling him names I don't think even Highwind's heard before.

—Help him, I burst out at last. —You broke him, you fucking _fix him_, goddamn you! (Nobody will ever know desperation as I knew it in that moment.) —_Please_ Seph, do it for me.

The scowl on his face said very effectively what he wouldn't waste breath on: what do I care about you, you've been a pain in the ass from the moment I met you.

—Fine, do it for Cloud then.

_Slowly, slowly we will get there._

It was the wrong approach to take, to ask him as if he cared. —_What do I care for some pathetic little __**human**_ He said, mocking himself, his voice so hoarse from disuse it was impossible to hear in it the normal undertones of his barely discernable dry humour.

—Perhaps because you've been obsessing over that pathetic little human for _five years_, I said impatiently. —I know you were in the lab, I added.

The edges of his mouth tightened with displeasure; an inquiring eyebrow raised itself disdainfully.

—Ifrit's horns, I muttered. —Did you seriously think I wouldn't realise something was up when my best friend started having one-sided conversations with thin air saying it's you?

There was an almost apologetic grimace before he crossed his arms and settled back. (—_It was my fault_, he explained quietly the very last time I saw him. —_**Nobody**_ _should have been there, not you and especially not him, he wasn't even– he was just a trooper. It was __**right**__, you understand? If I could give him something to cling to, to keep him living, even if it was out of hate, it was right. It was the only way I could even begin to apologise._)

—Do it for you, Aerith suggested gently. We both whirled around to face her. He opened his mouth to reply, or to ask her to clarify, I don't know which, only he blinked out of existence.

—Shit, I said. —There has _got_ to be some way to make him stay here longer than five minutes.

—Only true death, Aerith said, clasping her hands together. —And I'm not so sure about the effectiveness of even that. Don't worry, Zack. If he can't do it, we can.

—Bullshit, I said, burying my head in my hands.

—We can, she said resolutely, her eyes flashing. —And Sephiroth has enough pride left that he can't stand to see the image of himself committing such atrocities.

—You are _so_ manipulative, I grinned tiredly. —No wonder the Turks were after you.

She beamed in response, and made that beautiful swaying movement that always made me want to kiss her until air reminded us it was a necessity, not an option. —He'll be fine, she repeated firmly.

—What doesn't break you makes you stronger, eh?

—Uh-huh, she smiled sweetly, and I forgot all about Cloud for next few hours.

* * *

_Be patient and endure; some day this pain will be useful to you. Slowly, slowly, we will get there._

This is us. Right here, this is us. We are not a game.

* * *

A/N: Rambling, pointless, and confusing. Not to mention, cheerfully steals ideas from all over the place. If you made it this far, I salute you and offer candy.


	2. Acheron

**(Acheron)**

Your hand in mine. My voice in your ear. Together we fall.

* * *

We leave Cloud with his head bowed over the flowers in the Church. The sky is beginning to lighten at last as we travel, twilight blue fading to white over the Nibel mountains, dawn stretching pale fingers across the earth's brow, the sea lapping contentedly at Wutai's shores.

The other side of the world, in a place hidden from prying eyes, one of his former companions raises his head the way animals do when we pass by, remembering all of a sudden a man who might have been his son (Brilliant, a choice between a scalpel-wielding maniac and a vampire. Poor Seph'd be doomed either way.

He says nothing, but the sudden intensity of his glare tells me I should change the subject).

He tilts his head to the side, listening intently. If Vincent had fur like the dogs that prick their ears when we go by, there's no doubt in any of us he'd be bristling and snarling.

Vincent is lost inside a maze inside a labyrinth in his mind. He wavers from thought to thought, stumbles through tangled snarls of blood and loss and grief and nightmare. He flees the thought of us to a memory of Lucretia, a gentle comfort that the smell of stale mako and old blood soon begins to creep into, and the feel of her hands and the smell of her hair and the smile on her face crumble and are replaced with glass walls and the feel of wings that are and are not his tearing through his skin and unfolding like a curse.

We depart, Vincent remaining to ponder his sins, the beast named Chaos stirring fitfully inside of him at our passing, and follow the call to the girl logic says should be dead. (—Even the best make mistakes. Right, Seph?

—I can't believe you're joking about such a thing, Aerith protests.

—We're dead, sweetheart, there's no need to be tactful anymore.)

Tifa jerks awake with a gasp, her eyes blank and unseeing, for one blinding moment overcome with fear. Even when it recedes she is still uneasy, searching her mind cautiously for a possible reason. Rolling over she reaches for the clock and frowns at it, tracing the number the hands carve out with one tired finger. Back here the sky is still dark.

(flesh peeling apart, a red flower blooming – don't fall asleep, you might not wake again,)

There is something wrong with the stillness of this morning. It's anticipatory, and she curls back into the blankets, trying to find a reason for the pain in her chest and the dryness of her mouth.

There's an empty space part of her knows should be filled, and she's not entirely surprised at the idea that occurs that the place is Cloud's. That's not what's wrong, though, because the empty space is an old ache, one she nurses and tries to occupy with the abandoned and disaffected children that find their way to her.

She doesn't have a calendar. Not here in her bedroom, where she should be safe from having to think about the future. She does that too much outside of it, and that's why she comes here. Lives are supposed to be made here in this safe place, but not hers. She needs this place to be where she can be free of her reason, her sense and all the bindings that stop her screaming her anger and frustration at Cloud every time he comes back, slips back into her life as if he never left, never tore her open and left her bleeding. She hates calendars, thinks they're there to mark out the days, the months and the years she's lost to waiting, to searching, to whatever reason. She doesn't like the idea that her life can be fitted into the tiny little boxes alongside minuscule print that declares the holidays she never observes.

She doesn't have a calendar, but part of her knows already. She doesn't want to get up this early and have to face the date, so she turns away, buries her face in the pillow, inhaling her own exhaled breath, the sound reverberating in her ears. Sparks and motes of tinted light dance behind her closed lids, whorls and mists and chequered patterns, explosions of colour that fade and reshape into another in the infinity between seconds. She can almost be peaceful trying to define them.

Her bed is warm and comfortable and there are days when she just wants to stay there forever and never think about getting up again. She could just linger her life away; it would be so easy.

Without her consent, the idea of 'a year' enters. A year means many things to Tifa. It's a stretch of time she's never going to have again; it makes the anniversary of so many things a little more real, the scars a little deeper. A year implies another birthday missed and gone, another period of mourning being added on to the old. She used to care about the number of years since her father died, her hometown destroyed, until she realised that it made the years seem longer and emptier than they should have been.

This is the day of the almost-Meteor strike, the anniversary of the end of the world, the day a deluded, godhood-seeking psychopath surrendered to the shameful weakness that is death.

(—Death has no shame, Sephiroth whispers, stung. He's never let himself be resigned to his death but that doesn't mean he isn't capable of understanding it. Sometimes.

—Death is simply the other face of Life, Aerith says, and I don't tell either of them what I think.)

She resents Cloud's absence now. It feels as if he's somehow managed to weasel his way out of carrying the burden, the heavy weight of remembrance. (—Yeah? And what would you know? C'mon, say it to our faces!)

She resents his absence as a symptom of a disease – Cloud Strife is not a man or even a SOLDIER (he's something else she doesn't want to think about). He's Atlas, carrying the sky (carrying us) on his shoulders.

Truth is, she understands that Cloud is always going to be part of something else, is never going to truly belong in this mediocre world she and everyone else lives in. He's part of the Other now, lost to Lifestream and memories.

She knows that. But oh god, does she hate it. It would hurt less, if only she didn't love him so much.

(—Nobody could keep him for long, Aerith says quietly, sympathetic. —He's ours, really. You know that, you've been there with him.

'There' is our place, the combination of Lifestream and memories, and if anyone belongs here, as close to living as death will allow, it's Cloud.

—He's here already, Sephiroth says from his place on the other side of the room. —He walks here everyday, he's just forgotten to leave his body behind.

Then he smiles, and it's like learning the meaning of the word 'sinister' all over again. —I'll have to remind him someday, he murmurs dreamily.)

Cloud isn't really cut out for normalcy. Not anymore. Tifa now, she and the rest can slip back into the comfort their former lives, but Cloud's lost too much, suffered too much, changed too much to ever be able to fit back inside his skin – a monster emerged from the chrysalis of a normal childhood, he sometimes thinks.

(—What monster, Aerith asks. —You're just like Sephiroth.

—Exactly, Sephiroth says coolly, anger and hurt freezing to form cold hate. —A monster.)

Now that she's hit upon the knowledge of the Anniversary, she finds it impossible to forget. She doesn't have the same memories Cloud has, vivid flashes that use all the senses to paint a picture so riotous it takes minutes for his heart to still in his chest and for his mind to clear enough to remind him that it has been a year since it ended. Tifa remembers things the way normal people do, flat pictures misted with time and never quite right. She remembers now, and wishes the gaps were a little larger, the holes in the remembrance a little deeper, because then perhaps she would be free.

(A thin, high scream as a man's mind was torn to pieces)

This is the day it all could have ended.

(Echoing and sometimes she jerks awake expecting to see Cloud on his knees, clutching his head, trying to tear through his temples, screaming. Screaming, and what can she do before this?)

Sometimes, she almost wishes it had.

* * *

_down_

* * *

This morning is one Cid futilely hoped he would never have to face, or if he did, that he could face it fortified with a heck of a lot of beer. Six a.m. is far too fucking early to have to think about it but he's awake and he needs to keep busy, needs something that will occupy both his hands and his thoughts. Maintenance seems as good a way as any.

It's not like he knew her. I mean, hell, he joined their now legendary group last of all. Barely had time to get attached. So he can look at the loss objectively, the way the others can't, not clouded by affection and nostalgia.

It doesn't help. That's the thing about Aerith, no matter how briefly she touches your life, the image of her stays there, lingers with the scent of flowers and the stubbornness of glitter. She was a sweet girl, and he remembers a gentle smile, and calm green eyes. A girl soft and feminine and oh-so out of place among the grim-faced men (Blond or no, Cloud can do a kick-ass SOLDIER impression.

Sephiroth gives a huff of laughter beside me, but being the inconsiderate bastard he is, refuses to elaborate on the private joke) and confident, athletic fighting women who turned up at his door.

Those are pretty goddamn weak memories. It's the end he remembers most, the graceless, awkward way she fell and that hideous gaping hole in her abdomen, the way Cloud's hands shook helplessly as they covered it, a reflexive combat instinct to place pressure on a wound that couldn't be helped.

He feels a little guilt that he can't care more, give more to her, but at least he's honest. It was sad, it was a tragedy, but all life ends some time, and it's not that bad a way to die, he supposes, not compared to some of the rumours he heard serving ShinRa back in the war. (Sephiroth draws himself up to his full height, all injured dignity and insulted pride.

Aerith and me, we wisely back away pronto, and say nothing about the fact that those rumours were true.)

He went to the church, once, somehow managing to avoid Spike, although he could see as clear as anyone that someone inhabited the place (they whisper in the street that he's a ghost, a sentinel spirit given by the Planet to guard the holy place). He'd planted some delicate little flowering thing Shera got him, and he hoped that was the right thing to do. It seemed... appropriate, but what the fuck would he know? It's probably died anyway.

He'd never seen someone he liked skewered on a six-foot sword before.

A pretty girl in pink, he thinks, with all her life ahead of her. Twenty-two. Fuck, what sort of an age to die is that?

An' Spike even younger, barely an adult, face smooth and blank as a child (even if his eyes are older than the damn planet) and he's a goddamn 'hero', and he's so fucked-up. Maybe that's what being a hero means, he decides. Being strong enough to convince everyone else he can carry their burdens and not realise he's the equivalent of thin ice when it comes to himself. He's got people in the street in awe of him while he hides away in that church, breaking to pieces. Maybe that's heroism. Putting everyone (and damn, does he mean _everyone_) before yourself, and not in the manner of storybooks and fairy tales; really, truly, ignoring yourself for a stranger in the street,

(There are days when Cid wants to grab Vincent and Cloud, wants to bang their heads together and shake them until their teeth rattle and yell, "Stop! Just _stop_! Stop trying to take everyone's crap on your shoulders! Not all the fucked-up shit in this world is yours – let people take the responsibility for their own mistakes! …and stop sulking in the corners of my goddamn ship like fuckin' suicidal assassins!" But of course, he never does.)

He can convince himself that the world was never in danger, it was never a matter of killing a man fast enough to let the power of the Planet loose. He can convince himself of that, but he's goddamn glad the spiky-haired numbskull recovered, goddamn glad they were fast enough and he's gonna have to take this up with someone in the Promised Land one day, he thinks, staring at the love of his life, his precious airship.

Don't you know it could have all ended? You put the entire world on the slender shoulders of a fucked-up kid and placed him against the man who was his (god) hero, and (what kind of sick bastards are you?) did you _really_ think he could handle that? You're so damn lucky Spike is who he is.

Cid's got self-awareness. He knows that if he had been in Spike's place he'd have broken. Hell, broken ain't the word. He'd have shattered, been blown to sharp untouchable shards.

He throws the cigarette butt on the ground, cursing as he crushes it beneath one boot, grinding it into the dust. You bastards, he thinks, you complete, utter bastards.

* * *

_deeper_

* * *

Lucrecia is a dead woman. Ah, but dead women often hold greater sway than the live ones, much to the late Scarlet's displeasure. A dead woman, a dead mother is one of the most powerful people in the world. Men will kill in memory of their dead mothers, will conquer and rule for the pride of their dead mothers. A mother's dying wish holds so much more power than any wishes they expressed when healthy and there and doing what mothers do. A mother's dying wish is greater than a king's.

Lucrecia is a dead woman. Yet her body still lives. It's a similar thing – but not quite – to what occurred recently, Sephiroth's body (or the image thereof) darting around from continent to continent, town to town and battle to battle, while the 'real' Sephiroth appeared here and there, never for very long, a grave, sombre apparition that scared most of us unfortunates of the Lifestream shitless.

She's still a dead mother though, and she has the longest shadow any mother could have. She's the mother of a monster-god.

(Sephiroth walks to her, lays ghostly hands on her face, examines her features with gentle palms, searching. Searching for what I don't know, and he will never tell us.)

She opens her eyes, and they're dead and empty, but for the brief moment he gently traces their shape with slender fingers they flicker and live. She whispers his name through cracked lips, soft like a prayer and weak as a breath of air, looks through him almost as if she can see him, while her arms automatically form a cradle to rock the baby that never was.

She doesn't know what this day is, only that there's a pang inside her, like one of the contractions that heralded her doomed child's birth so many years ago, and she misses him so much, wants him so much, the child she gave up to science like a sacrifice to an old god, it's a physical ache in her heart. (He leans forward and puts his arms around her, whispering in her ear. For a brief, powerful moment, she remembers.)

Her throat aches (she keeps screaming it raw, the pained, hideous wails of a mother keening the loss of a newborn - _she didn't even want him_) but she keeps murmuring his name, over and over, as if she could somehow bring him back, give herself a reason not to self-destruct.

"Kill me," she begs us, and Sephiroth steps away. We leave her to her grief, as raw and fresh as the day a baby slick with blood and afterbirth was stolen from her.

"I hate you," she whispers, coughing up blood. "I hate you I hate you _I hate you_!"

It's hard to tell just who exactly she's talking to.

* * *

_and down_

* * *

He kneels beside the pool, looking deep. The mako that sharpens his eyes and ears takes a moment to remind him it enhances his every sense, even those that have been latent in human beings since they began to leave hunting and gathering behind.

His eyes (—they _glow_, jeeze, what kind of freak are you?

—Shut _up_ Zack!

—I'm joking! Holy frickin' Meteor! Do you see _my_ eyes being completely normal?)

His eyes are sharp enough to rival a hawk, and every ten seconds or so his head will jerk up minutely, just enough to verify that the movement of leaves a hundred yards away is nothing to concern himself with. It takes less than a second, all a matter of synapses and electrical impulses, so fast he doesn't even realise he saw anything in the first place. His ears can discern the stirring of animals deep in the earth beneath him, if he wants them to, (he doesn't. They do it anyway.) the worms chomping through dirt (that's all everyone is, you know – worm bait). His nose detects an assortment of sweet scents he recognises but cannot, having never been taught the names, identify.

(—lavender, moth bane, bee balm, dragon's tongue, briar-rose, and woodruff, Aerith tells us matter-of-factly. We take a moment to laugh.

Cloud's flower is the Black Archangel. The neat, hooded flowers are a deep, carnivorous red – among the pointed leaves they gleam like flecks of blood on green knives. They are hard to kill, and by some morbid quirk of Aerith's usually compassionate nature they grow best where he has shed blood or self. They have no meaning except what he gives them.)

A sense he cannot title, and understands is no longer possessed by any other human in the world, tells him the only life near him is not hunter, or at least, not of man, and that he is in no immediate danger.

Cloud realised, in a drugged, subconscious way as I half-dragged, half-carried his poisoned ass to Midgar that if he didn't learn to deal with the sensory overload he'd spend the rest of his life like all the other recipients of mako poisoning – drooling, unable to form a single coherent word… worthless. So his brain adapted, began to filter the information at a subliminal level. It's a matter of fine control – is this really important, is this information needed? There are some things that you train yourself to always be aware of (when I became First Class I taught myself how to pinpoint an ice cream truck's location to a street within three bars of jingly music. …What?) but as to the rest, he just tries to shut it down.

(Ah, the glories of mako, that necessitates learning the difference in smell between menstrual and arterial blood.

Have I told you that story?

It was a while after the war – not long, but long enough that people had gotten used to the fact that Sephiroth was in Midgar, not slaughtering people in another country halfway 'round the world. There was this rebel group – not a big thing, nothing serious like AVALANCHE, just a group of idiots who should've known better, getting drunk together, saying rude things about The Man; just graduated to acts of minor terrorism – y'know, breaking windows, scrawling graffiti in particularly prominent places, malfunctioning bombs at the train stations, like that would do anything…

Well, the Prez is hardly going to stand for that, not so soon after the war, not now he has the perfect dog to set on their trail with orders to destroy if necessary. We chased those poor bastards all over Sector Four until they darted into a brothel. I don't know what they were thinking – maybe that the Great Sephiroth was too high-and-mighty to follow them into a whorehouse, maybe that we would be too embarrassed to chase them through there, but evidently they were wrong.

So there we are, the women and their customers all lined up, the troopers turning the rooms upside down looking for these men, and Sephiroth keeps casting around like a bloodhound that's caught a scent it knows has nothing to do with what it should be tracking, but can't ignore. Sephiroth's taught himself to respond automatically to the smell of blood, and the more he tries to ignore it, the stronger the smell seems to get and at last he snaps, "Who's bleeding?"

Of course, one of the girls goes crimson, and the madam doesn't look much better – she looks ready to brain him with a frying pan.

"You can _smell_… smell _**that**_?" Another one of them squeaks, and Sephiroth – getting annoyed, because smelling blood is triggering responses inappropriate to a non-combat situation – gives a pointed look to the area which should never be indicated in company if you're any sort of a gentleman and says "What do you think?"

At this point, Mama-san really did try and brain him with a frying pan, and Sephiroth's response, naturally, was to break her arm in three places and that's how we managed to get SOLDIER banned as clientele from every brothel in Midgar, and also how we ended up trying to explain – to Heidegger, no less – that the city-wide scandal about SOLDIER brutality and Company interference in matters beneath their concern was all the result of Sephiroth being able to smell that this girl was on her period.

That story always got a good laugh from the newbies when I used it to explain about the type of enhancements mako would give them.

(But I didn't tell them about the girls, how they reacted to his even look with either defiance or shame, or how when he turned away one of them demanded, "Who th' fuck does 'e think 'e is," her voice tight with rage and tears, "lookin' at us like that? Like 'e ain't a man, like all the rest of 'em?" How she spat the word 'man' like a curse.

I didn't tell them that he vomited after we'd left, I didn't tell them about how he was convinced he could still smell the place on his skin, or how he said he could smell everything in there, he couldn't block it out; that to him the place had stunk of sex and stale perfume and old sweat, that it had smelt like despair.

I didn't tell them that.)

I think they laughed mostly that we all knew Sephiroth was a far apart from us as any of us were to a trooper, as a god is to a man. We knew we'd never understand what it was to be able to hear the continuous buzz of radio frequencies, or to smell the slightest amount of blood in a sea of people, or to be able to see so clearly in the dark it might as well be day, and be so blinded by even weak sunlight that our pupils had to become catlike slits.

They never understood what I told them, and to be honest, neither did I. Cloud understands now.)

In combat situations, he's just plain unnatural – all his sense sharpen, the brief flare of mako and Jenova cells making his eyes flash even brighter than usual, and he's vicious and fast, ready for anything, and he revels in it – it's better than any high. Most of the time (that's outside of battles) he feels normal (or at least, the way he was before), despite knowing there's enough mako in his veins for a transfusion to give a SOLDIER mako poisoning.

He still shies away from human habitation though (like an animal), and around Tifa he can't trust his own senses – sometimes he'll be able to hear her heart beating, when he's the other side of the room, or he'll look at her and he can see the way her brow creases minutely in pain or exhaustion, he'll smell blood from a tiny scratch on her finger that's already closed, he'll taste her apprehension on his tongue when outwardly she's as calm and serene as a statue. He'll know she's standing in the doorway behind him, watching him while he tries to drink (doesn't work; his body automatically breaks down the toxins and it just makes him irritable and light-headed – without the buzz) and he hates it. He doesn't want the reminders that he's an abomination, that Hojo tore him to pieces and rebuilt him into something (better) inhuman, something (great. The Great-) alien. He's afraid of what he might do to her, because he's not human anymore.

_Perfer et obdura;_

He dives.

_dolor hic tibi proderit olim._

A flash of memory. Lungs expanding, filling up the narrow confines between his ribs, demanding more than the stale air they hold inside them, his heart beating rapidly against his ribcage, forced to speed up to try (and fail) to cope with the demand of a dying body, the fight against instinct to open his mouth and suck in great lungfuls of precious air to appease the burning in his chest, the curious weightlessness the deeper he sinks. It's just a memory; he's been down there two minutes, maybe three, and there's no sensation, no fight at all beside that of the one he's battling now, the automatic urge to swim up and gather air he no longer needs so desperately. He's a second Sephiroth, a genetically modified freak – human rules are redundant.

(—That's not true! Aerith yells at him, but it's hopeless because it is, even Sephiroth can stand to admit it.)

He opens his eyes, and watches as the light sparkling on the surface recedes from him. He wonders if this is what Aerith would have seen as he lowered her into her underwater grave.

(—No, Aerith protests.

Yes. What's the point in lying when you're dead? No one but other restless dead can hear you anyway, and they've all come to same conclusion.)

He hits the bottom, silt stirred by his fall billowing around him, fishes darting away in a flash of perfectly synchronised silver scales, and the light from the surface so far above him dances over his skin in beautiful, spidery patterns. He lets us go. He's still waiting for the air in his lungs to run out.

* * *

_l'appel du vide_ - the urge to jump from high places, into a canyon, etc. Literally, "the call of the void."

* * *

A/N: There may or may not be a flower called 'Black Archangel'. Regardless, the description here is an amalgam of several members of the red nettle family. More specifically, the Yellow Archangel (Lamiastrum Galeobdolon) and the Red Dead Nettle (Lamium Purpureum) and thus, totally inaccurate. Basically, Cloud, you're a prickly weed.


	3. Mnemosyne

**(Mnemosyne) (In-Between)**

_god. Sephiroth. for the longest time, i couldn't tell the difference._

("Come. Worship. This is your God." They might as well have written that on the recruitment posters.)

* * *

(—_Is it possible, do you think_, he used to ask Cloud, longing to die, to leave his pain behind and being forced to remain, —_that we'll ever be free?_

Sometimes he even asked it as if he meant it.

Cloud's dreams when he asked this question were always of the mountains, of air sharp and cold but pure, and in his dreams he was fourteen – or was it thirteen, those slender arms and weak hands, normal eyes and smooth, unscarred skin? – and Sephiroth sat at the well and asked him how it felt to have a hometown, to have a family, to have a real mother, to be alive, to be cherished, to be immortal.

And every night Cloud would look at him and shake his head and ask, —Don't you know?

Sephiroth never understood.

The night before the end of the world, when he could still leave this place, when he was still Sephiroth, he broke tradition and asked him to make a promise. —_Promise me_, he said, after he'd explained it all and made sure he was listening, and even as he asked he was splitting himself to pieces, the coherence only temporary.

Like a fool, Cloud promised.)

* * *

_i loved You. we loved You. You were… perfect. yes. perfect. i'm sorry, i'm sorry, i'msosorry- but i meant it. _

_for me, perfection was Your face._

("On your knees. Beg for forgiveness.")

* * *

There is a reason Sephiroth so jealously guards Cloud's sleep, a reason we (I) have spent years waiting for those moments when Cloud is completely lost to the world, when the only thing he knows is our voices, our world, our shadows, our words.

(_Back then… you could get by with just skinned knees…_)

Not that it isn't _possible_ for him to see us in the waking world; it's just… difficult.

All right – he unconsciously blocks us out, as you all do. _Happy_? He catches glimpses of us, of course. Every time he's tired and worn out by pretending, he sees us, but it's never enough, you know? No, of course you don't.

He did see us properly once. Just the once. He woke from a nightmare one night – not one of ours, a 'normal' nightmare, if you believe in such a thing – and saw us, ranged around him as if at a deathbed, waiting for the man in it to die.

"You're not real," he said, desperately, and none of us could tell if he was sorry or glad. Aerith told me that she heard sorrow, but Sephiroth heard relief, where all I heard was desperation.

—What is real? Aerith asked, and I had to resist the urge to groan. Just because I'm dead, doesn't mean I've fallen under the spell of speaking in metaphorical riddles just yet. But Aerith, she's taken to it like a duck to water. Possibly because she spoke like that when she was alive and no one had the guts to say to her smile, what weeds are you smoking?

—Is shadow real? Sephiroth added with a sly, private grin, the grin that only Cloud receives any more, the one that says _you understand. You and me and no other, this is ours alone to know._

At this point I thought I'd better join the bandwagon. Present a united front of ghosthood, y'know. So, —Is music real? I asked before I could think better of it, because then I spent a lot of the following conversation wasting my time trying to figure it out.

Poor Cloud. First he had to deal with the belief that he was going nuts, forever seeing Sephiroth out of the corner of his eye, or Aerith in moments he could least afford it (she's particularly fond of showing up when he's riding his new bike. I keep telling her she's going to kill him one of these days but she says, much to Sephiroth's delight, that destiny-touched people with enemies like him just don't die riding a motorcycle) and then he had to deal with the knowledge that he really was nuts.

"Do you ever… see them?" he asked the remnants of the gang when they met the next day to say their goodbyes and what have you. Yuffie was heading home to Wutai; Vincent had only stayed out of a need to prove he could stop being a hermit if he wanted to, and he just didn't want to; Reeve was busy with Edge; Barret had taken time off to get drunk with the old gang; Nanaki was already back in Cosmo Canyon…

We were in the corner of the bar – I was trying futilely to pour myself a drink, Sephiroth was developing his special talent of looming in the corner of Cloud's eyes, and Aerith was telling me to make her a Behemoth (I don't even know the ingredients, why must you make me feel so inadequate, Aerith, darling?) – watching them with the wry smiles non-drunks have for drunkards.

"See 'oo?" Yuffie slurred, having finally worn Tifa's resistance down (or rather, everyone else's resistance, because she was so hyper and noisy they shoved their drinks at her just to shut her up).

"…never mind."

"Nah, nah, see 'oo? C'mon Spiky-spike! Tell us tell us! Telltelltell!"

He scowled at her, though if you know anyone as well as we know Mr. Pretty Pouty Face, you'd have seen the defensiveness in it, the knowledge someone has before time that what they say is going to sound stupid, and the scowl is a pre-emptive strike, a kind of 'well, this is stupid, but I don't care anyway, so might as well say it'.

"Them. Aerith… and… Sephiroth." (Note that he left me out, the ungrateful bastard. I'm not _that_ obscure. ...Am I?)

They gave him The Collective Look. You know the one. The one that says, why hello Mr. Madman, why have we never noticed you here before? which is then followed automatically by the careful glances to other members of the group which means, Okay, guys, why have we never noticed before this point that one of our number is a lunatic?

"Cloud," Tifa said, "I think you've had enough to drink."

His scowled got upped a few levels. "I'm not drunk," he snapped, with all the exasperated vitriol of someone who is well and truly drunk. Or a SOLDIER who can't get drunk, despite diligent attempts. "I just - forget it." He said bitterly, glancing towards our 'empty' corner.

"I see Aerith sometimes," Yuffie mumbled into her gin (originally Vincent's drink, but having Yuffie inches away from your face, trying to matches stares and clearly not about to stop anytime this side of doomsday is obviously terrifying even to vampires. Vincent, by the way, was at this time surveying the ceiling with a speculative look, the sort of look that belongs to somebody studying the rafters for structural weaknesses that might impede death by hanging).

Now Yuffie received The Collective Look of Exasperation, which is subtly different to previous example in that all know the receiver is drunk and therefore not responsible for the stupid things they say, but still find them extremely annoying.

"I do!" she insisted, flailing around like a true drunkard with a point.

"Shaddup Yuffie," Barret grumbled, slamming one meaty fist on the table. "Yer don'… don' talk 'bout dead people like that." (Then Sephiroth indulged in one his nastier impulses, moved behind him and gave him a fierce shove; the beer suddenly got the better of him and he slumped forward and slammed his head on the table so hard I choked. Sephiroth came back over and gave me a high-five, something I'd tried to teach him since _forever_ and he always refused to do on the grounds that it looked stupid and highly undignified.)

"I see them," Cloud muttered to himself. "I see them and it's not - it's not… I'm not mad," he said, leaning forward and hooking a bottle of Wutai's finest effortlessly with one hand. "They're real," he insisted, fixing them all with the Drunkard's Eye.

"Those that are dead never truly leave us," Vincent said, still staring at the ceiling. "They are held forever in our hearts and our minds and who is to say that is not immortality?"

Everyone, well used to these random outbursts of philosophy, ignored him completely.

"I see them," Cloud whispered, and he was casting frequent glances out of the corner of his eye by that point, Sephiroth's hazy image always just out of reach.

We used to be so merciful. We used to have so much _compassion_.

"They hide in the corners, just out of sight." His hand was shaking slightly. I remember that very clearly, because he was usually so still – his Freakouts™ were heralded by tiny little tremors, which became a kind of jerking, convulsive twitching, then he'd be taking great shuddering gasps of air that wouldn't help at all, curling in on himself before he lashed out and hurt someone (so very careful, so considerate. Especially when he was falling apart.)

Tifa thoughtfully liberated the wine bottle in his hand at this point. "There's no such thing, Cloud," she said calmly. (Sephiroth gave her the one-finger salute behind her back. It's not that he dislikes her particularly; in fact, he finds her amusing and very good entertainment. He just hates the fact his puppet can find the time and emotional reserves to actually give a damn about someone – anyone – else. I did mention he was fucked up, didn't I?)

"There is!" he said fiercely. "Tell me you didn't see them after Nibelheim. Your father, or your friends, or-"

"Of course I did," she said coldly, because even Tifa, Queen of Compassion, Saint Tifa the Masochistic, has limits. "In dreams. That's all you see, Cloud. Dreams."

He stared at her for a long moment, and said nothing, Sephiroth grinning at him over her shoulder.

"In the depths of nightmare and dream are hidden the greatest of truths," Vincent said, having switched his stare from the ceiling to a whiskey bottle.

Everyone still conscious told him to shut up the hell up.

* * *

_i would have served You willingly. i never needed to be forced to kneel. as far as i was concerned, You were the voice of god. no. not just the voice. You were the face, the form, the very image of god. You were god – You were _my_ god, and if You were other people's as well, that was unsurprising, but incidental._

* * *

Cloud sleeps. Cloud sleeps and in his dreams, there we are, like a little reunion all of our own. In this dream we stand in Aerith's endless fields. Around Sephiroth's feet there are thorns, and the flowers wilt, shrivel up and die and become a requiem of faded brown and black, a fire gone out. The scent of bee balm lingers around him and it says in a bitter voice, Cloud's voice: _your whims are unbearable._

(—I don't need you, Cloud hisses. He's eight years old today, and scars keep crawling in and out of existence across his knees. Sephiroth stands opposite him, trying to appear calm and aloof. He's failing.

—Liar, he accuses, flinging the word across space to him, like throwing a rope across a chasm. There are manacles of silk and steel wrapping around him like he's some overdone present. They tighten and loosen in time with Cloud's heartbeat.

—I don't! the boy (Cloud? _This_ fiery little asshole?) screams. —I don't I don't I don't! _I hate you!_

—Exactly! You need me to hate! Sephiroth declares triumphantly. The chains tighten so hard momentarily that his breath is driven out of him with a gasp.

Aerith edges next to me and slips her hand into mine. —Stop them Zack, she begs. —I can't stand it!

—Like _I _can do anything! I snap, but I'm not angry with her, not really. They don't even know why they're arguing. They just _are_.)

In the waking world, Cloud curls into a tight foetal ball, (trying to be a hedgehog in more than just hair, eh?). "Mother," he calls helplessly, and that should tell you pretty accurately how bad it is, how deeply their argument is gouging into him – since Sephiroth, he can't even _think_ of his mom as 'mother' without feeling a tiny frisson of unease.

(The screaming is rising in pitch. I have to admit, I'm impressed. I didn't even know they knew such words as they're flinging at each other.

Once upon a time, Sephiroth was the envy of the company for his serenity. In the book of company employees I made up – I've got to find that again somehow – it said next to his name: 'least likely to die of a heart attack or have a stroke like everyone else'. I think Reeve might've written that one - but anyway, trust me when I tell you that was a high accolade in ShinRa.

He's not like that anymore. Now he's restless, ever searching; he seethes, breaking upon boundaries like waves on a beach. His patience now is non-existent. His detachment is gone. So I shouldn't be surprised when he lashes out and hits Cloud so hard his head snaps back on his neck. I shouldn't be surprised but I am.

—Shut up, he hisses through his teeth. —_Shut up._)

Cloud grimaces in his sleep. His left hand opens and closes like a flower, like a gasping mouth, as blood trickles from his nose. "Shut up," he echoes, and even fast asleep, his voice shakes with rage.

(The image of Cloud flickers – now a child, now a man, now a teenager – but always his eyes stay the same. —Go away, he whispers, looking at the blood on his fingers. He looks faintly surprised and I can't think why when just about every scar he has is written in the Masamune's pure stroke.

—I can't, Sephiroth says irritably. —I can't 'go away' until_ you let me_. And you won't. Because I make you strong. Because without me you're nothing, just a stupid, foolish child – without me you have no worth at all, and you _know it_.

—Take your goddamn strength, Cloud snaps. —I don't want it. I don't need it.

Sephiroth laughs, wildly, hysterically. He sinks down beside him and wipes the blood from his enemy's nose and says nothing.

(You don't have anything else. That is what he might be saying in this moment in a world a hairsbreadth away. But he doesn't say it here.)

—…Why are we fighting? Cloud asks at last, in the thin, tired voice of a child who has been part of one too many fights that ended badly, the voice of a boy who has been asked too often if his mother was overly fond of the weather channel. A boy who has screamed and burned and bled and curled so far into himself it's a wonder he can talk at all.

Sephiroth shrugs. The shrug is the most eloquent response in the human language, I think, and nobody can squeeze quite so much articulacy from it as Sephiroth. It used to be the total extent of his social relations after all.

—Why don't we stop?

Sephiroth shrugs again. —I don't know, he says bleakly. He looks at Cloud, now a teenager with awkward limbs too long for him. —Tell me when you figure it out.)

Cloud wakes up and remembers nothing. He stares for a long time at the stars, slipping uneasily into that half-world between wakefulness and sleep, cocooned in his disconnection.

(—Hi, Aerith says sweetly, as if he wasn't visiting just half a second ago.)

* * *

("I've thought…")

_You were my god. And i wasn't enough for You._

_i worshipped You. You were everything. everything. i was nothing, and i knew it, but as Your servant, Your worshiper, Your slave, at least i was Your nothing. i would have done anything You asked._

_and You threw me away._

("…of a wonderful present for you.")

* * *

(—Here, Cloud says. A present.

Sephiroth blinks at the flowers. —…I don't understand, he says, frowning.

—Disappointment, Cloud says. Or perhaps he doesn't, because dreams have an odd logic that's all their own. —Rejection.

Sephiroth reaches out and plucks the yellow carnations from Cloud's hands. —I still don't understand.

Cloud rolls his eyes at him. —Your ego has overtaken your intelligence, he informs him snidely. Sephiroth scowls, twisting the flowers this way and that.

—What do you _do_ with them? He asks at last, perplexed.

—You pluck the petals, I cut in. —One by one, and you say, 'he loves me, he loves me not… ' and when you've got no petals left, that's your answer. I wink at Cloud, who looks like he doesn't know whether to hit me or howl with laughter.

—I don't understand, Sephiroth exclaims furiously. —What is the point?

—Somebody really skimped on your childhood, I say, snatching the flowers from him. —Just watch… I pluck a petal. —He loves me! I declare theatrically, dropping the petal. Aerith is already giggling helplessly, and the mortified blush spreading over Cloud's cheeks makes me wish I had a camera – it's been _ages_ since I've seen Cloud so humiliated he blushes. Well actually, if I think about, I think Aerith might have managed it once or twice. She makes the most of her aura of innocence to say some things that would make Cid stare at her in astonishment. Yes! There is sass in the sweetness! Honestly, why else would I date her? I'd find that holier-than-thou façade seriously irritating after a while if I didn't know what was hidden beneath it. Seriously, this is the woman who convinced a mercenary she'd just met to dress up in drag!

(She loses a few points for not getting photographic evidence though.)

—He loves me not!

Sephiroth stares.

—He loves me!

He looks at Aerith.

—He loves me not!

Aerith takes pity on him, and nudges him gently. —It's all right, she says soothingly. —You know Zack's a little… lacking in sense.

—Yes, Sephiroth says, casting a bemused look in my direction. —I still don't understand this ritual. How exactly is plucking a flower bare supposed to determine something as vague as love?

—He loves me!

Aerith shakes her head. —It's just a game, she says. —If I were you, I'd concentrate more on what Cloud meant to say when he gave you those flowers.

—He loves me not!

—They have meaning? He runs an impatient hand through his hair.

—Of course they do, Aerith explains. —Think of it… as a code.

Clever Aerith. I tell you, my girl is a genius. (But don't you tell her I said that, she'd be insufferable.)

—A code? Sephiroth inquires.

—Yes, Aerith nods. —Each flower has a special message, and people will give flowers to say things they wouldn't be able to say out loud. And of course, a flower can have two opposite meanings. A petunia, she explains, warming to her subject, —can mean 'your presence soothes me' but at the same time it can also mean resentment and anger.

—So that flower…?

—A yellow carnation means disappointment and rejection: you have disappointed me, she says. —Sorry, but there's no other message.

—He loves me! I grin widely at Cloud, who is attempting to beat his head against the ground. —Sorry Aerith, my lost love, but the flower has spoken!

Sephiroth frowns at Cloud. I'm guessing the words 'you have disappointed me' are ringing in his head. —That's not a very nice present, he says wryly.

Cloud looks up at him, only slightly cross-eyed. —It's not supposed to be nice, he snaps. —I fucking hate you.

—Language, Sephiroth says absently, still staring. He smiles suddenly. —This means I'll have to think of a good present for you in return, right? he says. —For when I see you again, he explains to Cloud's puzzled look. (That… doesn't sound good.)

—You're not going to see me again, Cloud says flatly, mystified.

—I see you all the time, forgetful boy, Sephiroth retorts. —But I meant, in the waking world. He chuckles. —We'll dance, he says, humming something light and frivolous, the sort of thing that makes you think of waltzing when you have know absolutely nothing about it: dah dah dah doo daaaah, doo doo dah dah … (I have this sudden mental image of the two of them fighting, swords moving so fast they're a blur… and suddenly they sheath the swords, clasp hands and start dancing with exact same grace and speed, one step two step three step, spin, forward, back, step, step, step…

Yeah. If I were you I'd be worried too.)

—You're _insane_, I tell him.

He doesn't even spare me glance. —I don't think _you_ have the right to talk to anyone about insanity, he says coolly.

—Seph- I start, but he cuts me off with a gesture.

—I don't know who that is, he says, lifting his nose in the air.

I tell you, there are some days it's just not worth waking up for.)

When he wakes up this time, he remains awake. He can't remember anything – these aren't the sort of dreams you remember – but he thinks he dreamt something to do with… dancing? Flowers, definitely. Gifts? Possibly. Not one of those dreams he has where he needs to worry when he wakes, he thinks.

He dresses and he leaves, and where he's going he's not sure, but he asks himself a question and the question is this: how long can I hold my breath?

* * *

_i placed my trust in You, and You betrayed that trust. i walked faithfully in Your shadow, and You cast me aside. You…_

("Shall I give you despair?")

* * *

(He dives.

_airneedair_

—Are you trying to drown yourself? I yell, but Sephiroth helpfully points out that if Cloud did, he'd happily bring him back to life, because, and I quote, "he is an idiot, but he is my idiot and I'll defend to the death the right to kill him myself."

_breathebreathebreathe _but that is an instinct for a human and he refuses to listen.

He lets us go. He waits for the air in his lungs to run out.

_Breathebreathebreathe_

—Hey, Sephiroth says. —Wake up.)

* * *

…_stopped being god. but you could have been. _

("Tell me what you cherish most.")

_oh, you could have been._

* * *

(Aerith casts a glance at Sephiroth. —Sephiroth, she says carefully.

Sephiroth blinks magnanimously at her to continue. It's a good sign, it means he's currently halfway sane. —Sephiroth, she repeats. —Do you… _like_ the way Cloud is acting now?

Sephiroth tilts his head curiously. Good sign? Bad sign? —Elaborate, he says.

Good sign.

—I mean… the way he refuses to let go.

—She means his suicidal tendencies, I cut in, ignoring Aerith's glare.

He frowns. —Am I the reason for that?

Bad sign. We exchange glances. Saying yes will please him and make him want Cloud to continue. Saying no will make him angry and possibly murderous that somebody else has an influence upon his property.

—It doesn't matter, I say hurriedly. —What matters is, do you like him acting this way?

—… I don't think so, he says slowly. He shrugs. —He's not very amusing to watch.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. This is one of those increasingly frequent moments I'd love to brain him with Cloud's Nailbat.

—Okay, Aerith says quickly, giving me a quick warning look out of the corner of her eye. —Anyway, you know how when dirt gets into a wound it makes it fester?

He nods, and refrains from rolling his eyes. Possibly out of respect, but more likely his mind's already wandered off.

—Well, memories of us are like the dirt in a wound on Cloud's soul. He's not very interesting to watch because he's injured, you understand?

—Yes, he says. But he looks slightly doubtful. (Cloud Strife to our wonderful General is the unbreakable plaything. He is absolutely convinced he's utterly indestructible; the thought that there can be damage that impairs the game instead of providing amusement is an astonishing revelation).

—When you meet him again- she crosses her fingers behind her back —wouldn't it be better if Cloud were at his best?

His eyes narrow dangerously. —I like him broken, he says firmly. I get that sinking feeling that always follows the realisation that Sephiroth's meagre grip on sanity has left the building.

The uncomfortable silence lingers. I'm afraid enough that I try to breathe shallowly, to do nothing that will set him off, one way or the other. Next to me Aerith has frozen, but she holds her head high with pride, her eyes flashing.

—Besides, Sephiroth says at last, —who said I intended for him to be like this when we meet? That would be no fun at all.

Aerith smiles behind his back and gives me a significant look. —It'll be all right, she mouths.

Sephiroth is very good at making Cloud stronger, at giving him a reason, even (especially) when he doesn't actually intend to.)

* * *

(And how does that make you feel?)

…_i…_

(Tell me. How does that make you feel, Cloud?)

_I don't want to talk about it._


	4. Erebus

**(Erebus) **

We're not there any more. It's fast, a blink, less than a blink, and there we are, from watching Cloud drown himself literally to watching Tifa drown in her late morning routine. It's funny, how such a spitfire can be so domesticated, can bind herself so utterly to such monotony. Or maybe it isn't.

She learnt a lot from watching Barret – some days he'd work extra hours, hours even his immense body wanted to refuse him out of sheer exhaustion, and she knew that after that he slept deeply and without dreams (He dreamed. No doubt about it, he did. He just didn't remember it). But she has her own way of dealing. Tifa can sink into every act. She'll think only of the arc of a high kick, how to throw her entire body into a punch, how to counter this move, how to dodge that. She'll think only of how to flip the strips of bacon and cook them evenly, how to fry the eggs over-easy (the way her father did them). She runs some mornings, she works late some nights; she makes her life a series of routines she can handle.

She wonders how many people are out there that do the same thing.

She stares blankly at the breakfast sitting on the plate, and she can't eat it. She thinks of the sparse meals she and the rest of the gang had to content themselves with when travelling fast and light meant more than staying well fed. The unhealthy indulgence of grease she sees on the table stares back at her and her stomach rebels against it. She made it because her father used to make similar breakfasts for her, she made it because all of a sudden she needs some connection to a normal life that seems nothing more than a faded but long-cherished dream now.

This isn't the way things should be. This isn't the way she should be.

(It took her weeks to get used to the Tifa Lockheart she met in Midgar.

She dressed the part, she spoke the part, she acted the part. She worked hard to get rid of her accent, the innocence and naïvety she felt others heard in it, worked hard to convince everyone, herself included, that she belonged there.

The skirt was just a little too short – she had to keep resisting the urge to tug it down – and the top was too tight – she kept casting frequent, uneasy glances at it, trying to reassure herself that The Scar was not visible. (God, how she hated it then, how it reminded her of that face, those eyes, the contempt in them; it wasn't life-affirming then, proof that she'd survived where countless others had not). It had seemed (still seems) to her a far more humiliating thing that someone should catch a glimpse of that disfigurement, that raw seam of flesh than if they saw the sensible cotton underwear hiding beneath the leather miniskirt.

(Cloud's scars are neat and silver and cover him like spider-silk. When Tifa first saw them in their entirety she wondered if they held him together, if the fragile webbing of raised skin was like a net wrapped around him, holding inside everything that might otherwise slip out. Compared to that poetry, Tifa's scar is an ugly one-word line between her breasts, a puckered mouth that drank in the silence where her scream should have gone.)

She kept wondering when her father was going to come in, grab her arm and lead her home, yelling about morals! and Decency! and I-did-not-raise-you-to-act-like-this! She would never have been so glad for a scolding. But then she remembered her father would never yell at her again, would never disapprove of her clothes or her actions again, and she'd pour herself a drink and choke it down, just to prove his absence.

In Nibelheim she was a teenage girl and she wore provocative clothes with the innocence that entailed, solely to vex her father, but in Midgar she was a woman. In Midgar she learnt her body was a weapon, just as her fists were weapons, and she used it accordingly.

She was surprised when she saw herself in Cloud's eyes after so long away. She had been convinced somehow that underneath the dirt of Midgar she had remained the same person, still the innocent fresh from burnt Nibelheim, the girl who asked him for a promise; she didn't recognise the woman he saw, the woman who knew make-up and knew how to use it well, who knew how to sway her hips without looking or feeling stupid, knew a hundred different ways to present her cleavage for better tips, knew how to promise everything in a look and deliver nothing.

No, she didn't like the Tifa Lockheart she met in Midgar. But there are times when she's been so grateful to her, times when she's needed the hard-as-nails woman she met there that if you turned back the clock, stopped Sephiroth before he began, she wouldn't be able to tell you she wouldn't go there anyway.

Today is one of those days when she needs her.)

She gathers the paper from the front step, still in her robe, the bold headline stirring some forgotten chord in her – she's been a small part of some of the truly great exploits to land on the front page – before turning and heading inside, locking the door (against what?)

The world. The day. Everyone and everything. Inside her home (she doesn't call it that, but in time she'll accept it as truth) she wants nothing of the outside to come in, nothing of the people she's helped to save, nothing of her past and certainly nothing that could become her future. If she wanted that, she'd be able to lock Cloud out. She tosses the paper on the table as she passes, beside the cooling food she'd throw out for the birds a year ago, and still will if the kids don't want it. She climbs the steps again, all of us standing at her slumped shoulders.

This is what she does to herself, to be able to handle the burden of living. It's the problem with your life being part of a big story. Stories are supposed to end. But rarely, if ever, do they end when you do. They end on a high, at the peak of your life (never mind that you're twenty, twenty-one, and your life shouldn't be this full, this empty for years to come) and when it's all over you still have to keep living.

There are signs around the house if you cared to look, that someone else lives here, at least some of the time. None of those signs point to Cloud, but then, Cloud, even Before, was never big on settling down, being some small part of a small town life (…not that Edge is small, per se). Of course, he _thinks_ that if he could go back to being sixteen again (fourteen is when it all started to screw up, but who's counting?) he'd be damn content with that dull life. (None of us agree. At fourteen, Cloud had big dreams and little sense, but now he's twenty-two, and he's seen things no other person in the world could have the strength to handle, he's got little dreams but the same amount of sense. Such simple pleasures that come with being a man aren't his to have any longer – he's got bigger things, like attacks on the Planet and the nightmares of a dead man to handle. He's never going to worry about kids, about his standing in the town council, about anything so trivial and important.)

She steps into the bathroom now, rubbing the sleep away from her eyes absently with one hand, and running the other through her limp hair and grimacing, feeling for a brief moment a desperate understanding that today is going to be a bad day (it's been a long time since her perception of 'bad day' has been so simple). She's still thinking of us. She turns on the water, wincing at its coldness, before shedding the worn-out robe, shrugging it off with ease and hanging it up.

(We can't look away fast enough (man, oh man, it's _Tifa_. Spike'd _kill_ me). Aerith puts her hands over her eyes, turning away (and it's still amusing every time she does it), I try to find myself in the mirror, while Sephiroth gazes at her calmly, one eyebrow delicately arched in a manner that could say any number of things, before turning away and studying the assembled luxury toiletries with fascinated repulsion.

Shampoo, rinse, conditioner. She likes the water hot on her cold skin, and steam curls around us, fogs the window and drips, leaving streaks of grey buildings outside and letting the weak sunlight in.

This is her reward for waking up another day (how surprised she was when she woke in Midgar, how she thought she'd never take the ordinary miracle of breathing for granted again). This is her reward for having enough faith to go through the motions. The shower washes away the morning, the past, leaves only the present, a dark calm more commonly found in the womb. Here is where she leaves herself in contemplation of nothing, here is one place where the thought of Cloud doesn't enter, and she can just be Tifa. In here, she can tell herself the tears are simply water; that she has nothing to cry for and even if she did, the shower does it for her.

She never wanted to be one of those pathetic women from trashy romance novels who wait for a man to save them. She learned martial arts so that she could save herself, not so she could lose herself to routine and regrets and the thought of a face with glowing eyes.

She understands at last why the gods armed the cruellest of them with barbed arrows.

Her eyes close as she puts her face in her hands, listens to the echoing of her heartbeat in her ears, the rasp of her breathing that's almost a sob, feels the heat of her exhaled air reflected back at her. At last, she lets us go, and we sneak past her, sneak out, down the stairs and run across the pavement, dodging cars and people like we're still alive.)

* * *

For Cloud, Tifa will always be the first girl.

That's why it'll never work out.

He can remember perfectly the first time he saw her, and didn't see the Mayor's daughter, or the girl next door or just another child out to make his life a living hell (and how he laughs these days when he thinks about it, knowing the real meaning of the words 'living hell'). He was six, and she was five. It was the middle of July, and she was sitting at the well, her feet dirty and bare, her hair tied back in a straggly braid already beginning to unravel, and she was humming over and over the theme tune of a Saturday morning TV show, and as far as Cloud was concerned, the sun shone only for her.

It was like he'd been hit the chest. It was like something in him suddenly switched on. All of a sudden he knew who he would grow up to be, he knew he was stronger than he would ever believe, and at the same time he felt pathetic and hurt and small, and he thought _don't look at me, please, let me run away now_, and he thought _look at me_.

He wanted to turn away, he wanted to run, just remain uncomplicated, but he was rooted the spot. Then she turned, and she smiled at him and it meant nothing to her, just an expression, but to him it was as if God had touched his shoulder, it was if the world had narrowed down to her face, to her smile, and he fell hard and fast with all the crushing simplicity of first love and knew with all his childish heart that he'd spend the rest of his life living for that smile.

That's how it begins. Always. (I might be describing my own first love.)

This is how it ends. Always.

She walks away. You watch her go. She takes the arm of another guy, or you watch her through the window as she leaves, or you see her running across a field or simply smiling at someone else in a way you previously, stupidly, thought was solely for you. But however it happens, whenever it happens, she's still gone, and you still feel empty, as if something has been ripped out of you. And something has – the part of you that knew what it meant to love, that's been taken, and you think that it'll never be filled, that you'll never love again, nothing will ever grow in that empty place where she used to be.

And maybe nothing does, maybe that space remains empty for years, but eventually, yes, someone else will step into that place made possible by her, by the first girl you fell in love with, and you'll thank her, because however much she hurt you (maybe soul-deep, maybe nothing more than a scratch) she made it possible for you to love that someone.

You let your first love go, always, because that's the way of things. Maybe you spent years with her, maybe you saw her only once, only for a few moments, whatever, it makes no difference. And maybe you didn't want to, maybe you ran after calling her name, maybe you screamed and pined for her, but you still let her go.

(You'll have realised by now that we're not actually talking about Cloud, right?)

Maybe, like my parents, you married this first love, and stayed married, and will probably die married to them. Does that undo my point? No. Because there is no way, absolutely _no way_ the little girl my father fell in love with (the first time he saw her, he was nine and she was beating up her next door neighbour for pulling her pigtails, punching him into the dirt) is the same woman who told me to be careful, to write often and call more is the same person.

First love can become last love, can become 'true love', but it can never remain _first_ love, do you see? To call someone your first love will always imply that at some point you started loving someone else, even if you never stopped loving him or her first.

Why are we discussing love again?

Oh yeah. Tifa. Tifa… has a motto. It's this – never give up. (Sorry, that should have been capitalised. Let me do that again: Never Give Up.) If Tifa got a tattoo, that's what it would be. Not 'Fight to the End' or 'Til Death' or whatever. No. That would mean something finite. That would mean that eventually, yes, there is a point where you stop.

Tifa wouldn't know how to quit if you hit her in the face (or tried to cut her in half, as the case may be). Never_ means_ never, means you keep going, no matter the odds, no matter that any sane person would have cut their losses and run long ago.

(The order is wrong. She's already lost.)

Tifa is the first girl for Cloud. When he thinks of her, deep in the heart of his image of her is the little girl, swinging her bare feet back and forth, humming a theme tune. It's so deep down, and so overlaid with other impressions you wouldn't know unless you dug deep, unless you tore all those delicate memories apart, unravelled all those intertwining visions.

Cloud had a choice, kneeling there, watching her bleed over his hands, between Tifa, the first girl, or the god waiting in the reactor's heart. And he chose Sephiroth. He let go.

That doesn't count, you might argue (she might argue). It was a matter of revenge, she would have wanted it (oh, she did) it was something too fast and too muddled to be a conscious decision.

Lies. All of them, lies. Yes, it was something fast and muddled, seconds, not minutes. But he _chose_ to run after Sephiroth, he _chose_ revenge over her, he decided in that moment that killing him was more important than her, than the girl who would become the woman everyone (who is this everyone?) expects him to marry. (And anyway, it was very difficult to think of how much he loved the girl next door when for the next five years he was a little preoccupied with staying alive. Strangely, things like the love of your life pale into insignificance faced with that.)

You never forget your first love though. That's why Cloud runs, but never too far. That's why he's stopped replying to his calls, but doesn't get rid of the phone.

(…this is why you stop loving someone even when you don't want to:

Because if you don't, you destroy yourself, you destroy them. There are some people, abandoned by the first girl, who won't stop calling, who weep, scream, go on hunger strike, threaten drastic measures. And the other, the object of their adoration, despite knowing better, goes back to them and keeps going back. And even they're not there they blind the eyes of the fool, ruining them for anyone else.

So you let go. Because it's not a choice. Because you must.

Shall I tell you Tifa's side of the story? How I love to spill secrets.

Here. Tifa's never loved anyone in her life, not the way you expect to love someone in your secret heart. You expect, deep down, to love someone the way they never tell stories about. You don't really believe in love at first sight, or second, or third. You don't expect to be overwhelmed with attraction for someone and have that result in the type of relationship you'll want to spend the rest of your life in. You expect it, deep down, to be slow, for it develop out of trust and affection and friendship, a gentle transformation of things already there, not a thunderbolt out of the blue. Secretly, this is the truth of how you expect to love and last. Tifa loves like…

(—A Boa Constrictor, Sephiroth says dryly. —Or a stalker.

—Shut up before I make you, Aerith snaps.)

…like a forest fire. It's beautiful, it's the type of love they talk about in legends, it's the type of love that will leave little girls who imagine themselves as princesses sighing, but it's deadly and mindless and it's not… You watch a love like Tifa's burn, and you admire it from a safe distance and thank your lucky stars you're not the one involved even as you lie to yourself and wonder with a sigh what it would be to be loved like that.

It's destructive in the extreme. You can't love like that and not burn with it. You can't be loved like that and not be destroyed by it. It's a matter of who is reduced to ashes first.)

Someday, I think, Tifa is going to win. She shouldn't, because after all, what have I just been telling you about first love? But she will.

Until then, it's a cycle as vicious and stupid and funny and grim as the one between Seph and Cloud. _Never give up_. Even when you should.

* * *

Barret has never been big on sappy sentimentality.

(—Liar, Sephiroth breathes, inhaling the falsehood and rolling it over his tongue like some delectable confection, tasting the leader of AVALANCHE's denial, sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet.)

But when it comes to ShinRa, and what they're doing, he can't help but sentimentalise a little (a little? Any more sugar and your teeth would _dissolve_ instead of just falling out). When you deal with issues that big, it's hard not to make it a matter of old-young children and words on freedom and sunlight and happiness. He tells himself he did what he did for the children (his child), for all the men and women suffering under ShinRa oppression (for himself, for his wife, his town, to soothe the burning resentment deep in his gut). He made speeches, swayed others to his cause (his just cause) and he knew, somewhere behind impeccable shields of self-denial that he was lying.

He did what he did because he needed revenge. That's all. He detested (detests) Strife the moment he saw the cocky bastard because Strife felt no need to lie, no need to dress up his simple need for vengeance with poetic speeches and glorifying words about oppression and dying and saving. Spike gave his reasons and wasn't ashamed to acknowledge that his retaliation was all for him.

(Of course, he knows now that Cloud lied on a far grander scale than his own petty little glorifications. But it stung, back when Cloud was a mercenary, not a broken, shattered shell of a man of who hides away from his duty.)

He's vaguely ashamed at the selfish reasons that first drew him to something with such far-reaching consequences, something that should have been selfless. But, he thinks, if anyone can understand this, can take the sting out of it then it's Aerith. So he visits the church today, while Cloud sits naked (sadly, he hasn't called us) beside the pool he's tried to drown in, letting the sun dry his skin and his clothes and wonders if he should go home, if only he could figure out where home is. Marlene skips outside, and Barret tells Aerith about his day, in faltering, uncertain words, about the big things and the little things in his life, wishing he were blessed with the type of intellect to create language of poetry and beauty out of nothing. (He worked at his speeches relentlessly, turned them over and over in his head until he could call them to him easy as breathing, and a lot of it stuck, made it easy to form a web of ideals and metaphor to hold him firm.) He stumbles and wavers, but he keeps going, doggedly, resolutely (he's got faith. He _believes_), offering yet more trivial little sacrifices to an altar of flowers and the imago of a woman turned goddess.

(They'll commission a statue one day. Sephiroth will be a hideous beauty of a nightmare by then, a black dragon wing stretching out from the wrong shoulder, fangs dripping from sneering lips, eyes fashioned out of little emeralds forced in an expression worthy of Hojo as he glares down at his opponent – who will be six foot tall and built like a tank, rather than a slender man-boy with wild hair, barely on the cusp of adulthood. Behind the Champion, Aerith will smile serenely, hands clasped, and weep tears of blood.)

He spots a tiny flower, trapped in plastic. He doesn't need to look closer to know it's the one a swaggering mercenary gave his daughter, before it all began to fall apart. He wonders who put it there, who pressed it, if Cloud has seen it.

Stupid, he berates himself. Cloud _lives_ in this damned place, of course he knows. And he feels that little flame of resentment flare up again at the self-pity of such an action. He douses it by remembering the kid's face drawn tight with fear and horror at the realisation he gave the Black Materia away. He holds the image in his mind, tries to fuse it together with all the others he has (mercenary puppet leader healthy mako poisoned afraid confident lost) and finds it slips between his fingers like a ghost, a chameleon that fades into its surroundings no matter how hard he tries to force it to stay one colour.

He hates SOLDIERs. As far as he's concerned, all that was wrong with ShinRa can be summed up in a SOLDIER's eyes. Fucking unnatural.

But all that's wrong with the world can be summed up in Cloud Strife's.

When he's honest (read: so drunk it's a miracle he's alive) Barret doesn't like Cloud. (That's not so odd as you might think. For people who only know the Cloud that emerged from the ashes of Nibelheim, he's a hard person to like.) He can respect him, but he'll never like him, he'll never sink beers with him the way he does with Cid, or feel the same paternal desire to protect as he does with Tifa who's only a year younger; he can't even share that tentative camaraderie he can have with Vincent. Something about Cloud… something about Cloud and his eyes (and perhaps… the way he'll say that name, the way he'll sometimes look right through people like everyone and everything means nothing) is much more terrifying than a Turk that turns into a monster when stressed. Deep in his heart, Barret is afraid of Cloud Strife.

(Like Barret would ever be afraid of that pansy ass, he tells himself, like that scrawny blond kid could scare _him_. There are days when Barret doubts he's old enough to be out of school, never mind drink/drive/smoke/save the world.

But when he looks at them the way he did on the night of the Lifestream, when he looks at them like _that_… forget Sephiroth, who could make his heart sink to his boots, Strife can send his heart plummeting through his boots, into the ground, and to the other side of the Planet.)

Barret doesn't know the particulars about what made Cloud into the equivalent of a SOLDIER. The cold shiver that makes its way up his spine tells him he doesn't want to. He thinks of Sephiroth, who's always been a poster photograph or a flickering TV image to him, going mad because of a few damn words and trying to break everything to pieces and he thinks, _if the General can break..._ If the General, the man they said had no emotion, can break like that over a few words and some excessive SOLDIER modifications, fuck, no wonder Cloud hides away in this place.

But that doesn't mean he should.

Barret cares about others' self-pity even less than ShinRa.

(—Hypocrite, Sephiroth murmurs, fingers digging harshly into Barret's shoulder as he leans over and repeats it again, hisses it in his ear like a curse.

(The emptiness, the futility of Barret's existence before he discovered AVALANCHE, before he realised there was something out there for him. The utter despair of everything, _everything_ gone, taken from him – his wife, his best friend, his home, and a little girl who wasn't his, that looked at him with his best friend's wife's eyes and burbled happily as if he were the good guy, as if he had any idea how to take care of her, keep her safe.

Planet, the utter pointlessness, the desolation. The voices in the dark that sneered at him, the flames he saw whenever he heard the word ShinRa, and the shame, so very heavy on his broad shoulders.)

Aerith grabs Sephiroth, hooks her arm around his throat and uses her other to brace it, tries futilely to drag him back. He resists for a moment, the pressure of her forearm attempting to crush his oesophagus little more than an irritant, before he realises what she's doing and lets her pull him back.

He's dead, and he's confused, and he's beginning to hate the living even more than when he was alive.)

Barret feels only a cold breeze, but it's enough to make him stand, move away, back to Marlene, skipping outside. He's done his penance and he feels drained and tired, though it's not even midday. He can get through this day. Why think of the cost, when so much good came of it? ShinRa is gone (Sephiroth is dead) the mako reactors are closing down (the materia is no longer used) the Planet is healing (Cloud is falling apart).

Behind him a shadow detaches itself from what's left of the rafters, leaps nimbly down and lands softly on booted feet, kneeling by the flowers. Barret doesn't look round to see Cloud leaning forward and quenching the flame of the candle he left behind between two gloved fingers. (Sephiroth snarls, his expression bitter and resentful, the words dark and sinister but his gestures powerful and regal. Aerith smiles uncertainly, warily, no longer quite safe in his company).

Cloud looks over his shoulder and smiles at us, water-streaked face devoid of life and tears.

* * *

(14 hours fifty two minutes)

Marlene is skipping, _one two three_

Because Papa is busy, Papa is remembering the night the Flower Lady sent The Green to fight that nasty rock. She doesn't call it Meteor, though she's old enough and intelligent enough to understand that's what it was. 'Meteor' brings with it a bad feeling; it makes Papa's face tighten with anger and well-suppressed fear, and it conjures up a dark shadow that she's intensely afraid of (way to go Seph, nice to see you've still got it) and she can't help but feel a cold shiver of dread when adults mention the name.

_Four five six seven eight nine_

Uncle Cloud never mentions it either. Marlene is just a little scared of Uncle Cloud, because for all he's pretty and looks delicate, like one of the Flower Lady's roses, he's got terribly sharp thorns, and his _eyes_… his eyes are _really_ scary. They've got dark places in them, dead places of shadow where you can lose yourself, and sometimes when he looks at her with those (unnatural) blank eyes, he looks through her and into her and it feels like he's flaying her soul to pieces. He's touched by the Planet and scarred by the demigod, and she hates it, because he's the strongest person she knows and he's so weak.

She likes the flower he gave her (Aunty Tifa pressed it for her and then she put it in the Flower Lady's Church where Uncle Cloud hides from himself) but she never meets his eyes save when she needs to (because, hell, even Cloud can't fight an innocent's gaze).

_Ten __eleven twelve_ _thirteen fourteen_

And Uncle Cloud brings the shadow with him, wherever he goes. Whenever she sees him, the shadow is always at his shoulder, in his eyes, and it has a smile as sharp and brief as a blade and eyes as penetrating as the Flower Lady's, without any of the warmth and human connection. She misses the Flower Lady most of all when the shadow looks into her and grins a lazy, bloodstained grin.

She's heard Uncle Cloud call the shadow 'Sephiroth' sometimes, when he's vague and distracted and allows himself to see it (but only for a few seconds, so fast he thinks he's just paranoid. And he is. But only partly, because no one else can actually _see_ any of us) and the name brings some hazy recollection…

Papa's friends, the ones that left for the Promised Land said something about him a long time ago (last year, or maybe it was the year before that? The years blur when you are a child, leave behind only specific events), when they were talking about helping the Planet and destroying the reactors, something about 'figurehead' and 'scary (nasty word she's not supposed to know)' and 'glad there's no chance of meeting him in a reactor any more…'

That would mean the shadow is dead and has returned to the Planet. But it's not. It isn't quite part of the Lifestream. She knows this. Not if it fights so hard to be near the living. Papa said the shadow was a bad man, who sent the Flower Lady back to the Planet, to the Promised Land, but that isn't right either, because she _felt_ the Flower Lady on the night the Green came, and Papa has to know that was her. She's still around too, she knows she is, and Uncle Cloud knows it too. He always has an old, haunted expression, a pinched, wary look about his face.

_Fifteen __sixteen seventeen_

She doesn't ask about the man-not-a-man that makes Cloud's eyes go dead and Tifa's face tighten, but one day Uncle Cid came round – little Marlene, she has so many uncles and so few aunts – and (maybe had a little too much to drink, maybe trying to match Cloud – you haven't seen anything until you've seen some poor sap try to drink a SOLDIER under the table) he told her about a war and a General, a history lesson she listened to dutifully, and later, much later, when it would probably have been suicide to try and light up a cigarette without igniting alcohol fumes, he told her about science experiments and hate and dislocation. She can put two and two together, and she understands that the man Uncle Cid spoke of with both reluctant respect and acknowledged fear is

(_Sephiroth_, Cloud says quietly in his sleep, as if the world is held in that word, that name.)

She began having nightmares of a tall black shadow standing in a field of blood, with sharp green eyes that laugh as he throws Meteor up into the air and catches it again with quick, practised flicks of the wrist, the other hand holding the ends of bloody strings that are buried deep in Cloud's skin.

_eighteennineteentwenty_

She doesn't wake screaming. (Aerith holds her gently; stroking her hair, caressing away the nightmares with practised ease – she does it for Cloud all the time – and replaces the nightmares with dreams of endless fields and serene laughter.)

_twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three_

Marlene skips, and although she's a smart kid, far too old for her age, she doesn't realise she's doing the same thing Cloud does, only slightly different, losing herself in numbers and pattern and routine to avoid thinking about the way things are. But she's a child; she's got an excuse.

_Twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six_

She misses the Flower Lady. She knows the Planet is hurting and in pain, and she wishes desperately that the Flower Lady could be here to help soothe it. She realises what everyone else thinks – that it's not her problem, it's no one's problem but Cloud's, because for some reason, the Planet chose him. The Planet chose him now that the Flower Lady has gone back to her people and for some reason that means he's at her beck and call, that every threat is his, no one else need bother about the Planet, he can never break (he's already broken). She wants to scream at them, because it's supposed to be a joint effort on _everyone's_ part to help the Planet, otherwise no matter what Cloud can do, it will never be enough.

_Twenty-sev-_ she trips on the rope, and lurches, skinning a knee before she can gather herself back up. Blood wells, sluggish red beads that collect slowly in the centre of the broken web of fragile capillaries, and she purses her lips, an old woman with dark hair, tries to tie herself to the pain and the blood and her body.

She starts the pattern again, and slackens her hold on us, allowing us to leave. We stay a moment, (a muscle in Sephiroth's jaw is twitching, but neither of us is suicidal enough to ask him why) watching as she re-establishes a rhythm of loss.

_One two three four_


	5. Tartarus

**(Tartarus) (The Geostigma)**

The safety and serenity of the church is Cloud's siren, is the song he can't resist, calling him to his doom (he's not sacrificing his life, but the life he could have, the person he could be. His relationships, his family, his future, he throws away these things by being unable to resist the call). This place suits him down to the ground. It's close to the Planet here, and the mako in his veins hums in recognition. This is the one place in all the world where anyone can feel what Cloud does everywhere, realise how close the Planet truly is, the power and magic in Her that runs just below the surface of their fragile human lives.

He runs gentle, disinterested fingers across the materia collected over his travels, hundreds of little orbs, some a thousand years in the making, and wonders how long a SOLDIER's natural lifespan is

(—What natural, Aerith asks. —What can _possibly_ be natural about pumping the Planet's lifeblood into your veins?

—Until they die, I say, standing back from the flowers)

if he even counts as a SOLDIER

(Sephiroth shakes his head, an ocean of understanding in one inadequate gesture of denial)

and how long must he wait for his body to stop fighting against the laws laid down by nature and fought with science, to give up, give in.

(Forever. And its true, it has such cruelty to it that it can't _not_ be true. Twenty-two and already he longs for death like an old man ill and dying too slow.)

As if he feels it, echoes of a hideous truth he can't bear to face, he stands and leaves his sanctuary, out into the crush of humanity he touched so briefly, so violently just a year ago. And just like us they're oblivious to his presence in their continued existence. (Didn't I tell you he should be one of us?)

He's sleepwalking through the motions of living and he knows it, surrounded by innocently unaware worshippers who don't know he's the one, the 'Planet's Chosen' that they believe he must be, who stopped the world from ending simply by following his own revenge.

He puts one foot in front of the other, making himself move without registering the effort, is standing on the other side of the road before he even realises there was a road to cross.

He stands stock still for a moment, the wind cutting through the chaos of thoughts to leave his mind as clear and empty of emotional turmoil as it is among the flowers. He's going through the motions, a reality somnambulist, but one day he'll wake once more, he'll stand still again and realise he's sunk so deep into the act of pretending that it'll become the truth, the way it did not so long ago. "God," he whispers, faintly astonished, to a blank sky.

( —Yes, Sephiroth says at his shoulder. —I am.)

Could he really do that? Would it be so hard, to live?

(That's Aerith, pressing a hand to his forehead, mother checking for a fever, fogging his mind. The effect is only temporary – a split second of intense questioning followed by emptiness – what was I just thinking of?)

It's not enough, it's never enough. Blood must be paid with blood. The nightmares will stop only in death, the iron strings on his life will be cut only when he dies and can no longer fulfil the duty some cosmic bastard set out for him, of the Planet's Guardian (why, we ask. Why him, why us, how could you be so cruel). That is what Cloud thinks.

And the worst part of it is, he's probably right.

(—No, Sephiroth whispers, one iridescent raven wing flickering into existence for a brief, heart-stopping second. He says the word a lot, as if he denies it enough, it'll become reality. Sephiroth wants to live so badly; he was never reconciled to the thought of his own death, so he despises this existence forced upon him now because he can't let go.

We can't let him leave, because Sephiroth is… a sickness, even without meaning to be. So he joins us here without his consent, furious at being so close to living and not being part of it, but it's the only comfort the Lifestream can give him. Sephiroth's will is too strong to allow him to let go of all his ties to the living world – how long he spends watching Cloud sleeping, counting each inhale and exhale, filled with an unpredictable rage that this boy should live and he does not – but he's too volatile, too dangerous to be allowed to go back.

There is no way out.)

He walks. He walks and he listens to the Planet singing beneath his feet, and he can almost believe it when he tells himself he doesn't want to die.

* * *

The children of the street watch him as he passes, a pale man in dark clothes with hair that turns almost white gold when the sunlight strikes it just right. They know better than just about anyone who he is. The children are closer to the Planet than the adults, because they haven't yet learned they shouldn't be.

They watch from alleyways and shadows while the Planet whispers in a language without words, _champion_, and _strife_, and _defender_ and _save_.

Strife is whom they run to with messages from the Flower Lady and he accepts them with a solemn smile and directions to a kind woman who'll feed them and give them a place to sleep that has a roof for once. They adore him for this, and their goodwill is stronger and lasts longer than the adults, perhaps because this kindness is personal. Perhaps because they see his eyes.

They know he's haunted. He can feel their speculative gazes on his skin, watching as he slips between the cracks of the waking world like a shadow, glides in and out of perception, nothing but the shimmer on the edge of a sword blade and the rustle of midnight clothes to give him away.

(In Yuffie's language there is a word for creatures like him that vanish when you look at them, beings that are suspended between this world and the next. In Yuffie's language there is a name for those shadows as incorporeal as clouds. But these are the orphans of ShinRa, and there is no word for them to use but his name.)

They know he's haunted, and their gaze summons us every time he passes. It's like this – we're Cloud's for a while, we walk beside him, and then they think of us – _call us_ – and we switch, watch Cloud as he walks by, then jump back, his once more.

Sephiroth likes the children. Some of them… some of them are too close. They can hear us (him) if they listen hard enough, if they concentrate.

And some of them, just a few… some of them he can _touch._ His hands leave a stain, a tiny kernel of himself, his madness, his _sickness_ behind, something that the Planet will water with its hate to make it flower – a bruise, a lesion, a violent declaration of possession; as if to say, watch (remember me). See me gather strength from you, one… by… one.

We can't watch him all the time. That's the downside of keeping him here.

(_remember_) For so many people he was everything.

(_Me_) It's a war, and it's spreading. _How many people, Planet, are you going to give to me trying to protect them? _

They call it Geostigma.

* * *

Sephiroth fears being forgotten. So do I. I think everyone does, who was once a man. While Cloud lives, this is not even a possibility for us. But after he's gone who will hold Seph, hold _us_, in their hearts? This is what worries Seph. Will whispered ghost stories be enough to keep him safe? Will superstitious murmurs and faded myths be enough to keep him real? Yes? No?

But…

If he causes enough damage, if he makes his shadow long enough, could he survive until humanity itself falls?

Can _I_? Do I _want_ to?

I miss beer. I miss being able to drink away existential problems. (—Carpe Cerevisi! Sephiroth grins widely —never mind the day, seize the beer!

—Sephiroth! Aerith complains light-heartedly. —You don't bastardise a language like that!)

Let's try something. _Death. Dying. Dead. _Say it a few times. You'll get used to it.

(I lie, of course. Right up until the moment it actually happens, the moment you're snatched from this world – and the term always seems to be 'snatched' because however long you had, it's never, ever enough – you'll never be used to it, no matter what you tell yourself or others.)

Don't be afraid. There's nothing to be frightened of.

(Again, another lie. There's plenty to be afraid of. But at least you're not going to die, hm?)

I don't mean to frighten you (except when I do) but you've got to understand, all things end. Even Cloud.

Even us.

Even you.

* * *

Denzel likes her. Tifa. It's partly that she's kind and well-meaning, and she doesn't pity him for the aching discoloration on his forehead, as much a mark of his demise as if he had his own death warrant taped there, as if he had a bullet hole in place of a bruise. It's partly because she smells good; like fresh baked bread, like cake, and then there's the sickly sweet-sharp scent of the assorted liquors she mixes. It's partly that her hands are warm and strong and smell cool and lemony (all kitchen based disinfectants smell like lemon. Don't believe me? Go check.) as she wipes away his tears of pain and he knows those hands will never let him down. It's mostly because some part of him, deep down and secret, has already given her the label of 'mother', but he'll never say that out loud.

(Pity. If ever there was a woman born for mothering, Tifa is that woman.)

He likes Cloud too, when he's there. He thinks he's cool (it's the bike. Gotta be the bike.) even if Tifa does look a little strained and pale when he stays (because of course, she knows eventually he'll leave). He can't understand why Cloud would _ever_ leave.

This was a temporary arrangement, and there are still days when he looks out of the window and wonders why he hasn't left yet, why nobody has told him to, but-

Home is not made of bricks and mortar. This is home, and these people are family. Simplicity itself, and if only people would trust it, that some things really can be that simple.

He used to keep telling himself he'll leave tomorrow, stop being such a burden on such a nice lady, but it's kinda nice, having a family, people who care about him and he likes Marlene a lot, he doesn't want to leave without saying goodbye to her and she's with her dad right now; anyway he's not over keen on going back to the street, without Tifa's home cooking or her gentleness when the Stigma is at its worst, and besides it's going to rain tomorrow, and Tifa is going to cook a huge family meal tonight when she gets back from (the Candle) that big meeting she's going to and won't tell him about except to say she's got him a babysitter (like he needs a babysitter at his age! He's not a _child_), and Cloud promised him he'd finish the story about what happened in Wutai with Yuffie 'Miss Materia Hunter' Kisaragi, and he really really really wants to stay.

It's nice. He feels accepted here. He's the happiest he's ever been, knowing he's going to die.

* * *

He's worked so hard to leave the damn wheelchair. It _mocked_ him, and continues to mock him, saying in a brutal, stark voice: buddy, you may have been the most powerful man in the world, but you're just another cripple to me.

He loathes it, despises it, _hates_ it with every fibre of his being.

(—Hate comes from fear, Sephiroth says with relish. —Are you afraid you're going to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, Mr. President?

—Maybe it's just me, I hear myself murmur in an undertone to Aerith, —but does he sound like a teenager pulling the wings off flies?)

The Wheelchair (it _deserves_ to be capitalised, trust me) turned him into human wreckage, a tired and worn-out doll kept only for nostalgia; it made him feel weak and alone.

(Whatever happened to Dark Nation, I wonder?

I loved Dark Nation. Sephiroth deliberately tried to prevent me attending any meeting that contained Rufus (rare as it was for our paths to cross) because he invariably brought Dark Nation along, and I always went straight to Dark Nation, crouched down, and petted him until his golden eyes closed in pure bliss. Or if I was feeling particularly annoying, until he rolled over and wriggled all four paws in the air, begging for mercy.

"What's that, Dark Nation," I'd ask delightedly, one eye on Rufus' reddening face, "Rufus is an asshole and deserves to be thrown down a well? I hear ya, buddy.")

But Rufus Shinra has an innate ability to turn just about anything to his advantage. He may be worn-out, but never broken. Mind like a fuckin' snake, as Reno would say.

He thinks of Elena, air-headed, bubbly Elena, who plays the decoy and the ditz to perfection. Elena, with a mind sharp as a trap underneath all those carefully crafted layers of cotton wool, who can outshoot Rude on a good day and can get Reno to do paperwork with one subtle hint about menstrual cycles and the effects thereof on a woman's temper.

He thinks of Reno, lackadaisical, smart-mouthed Reno, with his worryingly orgasmic response to fireworks and his incredible talent to find alcohol among teetotallers; Reno who can pilot five different types of aircraft drunk, knows fifteen ways to kill a man using nothing more than a sock, and can persuade a person he'd beaten half to death that the fight was all their fault in the first place.

He thinks of Strife – too weak for SOLDIER; the only person ever to face Sephiroth in a real fight and walk away.

Weak, huh?

Another brilliant quality in the erstwhile President is an ability to perceive threats to the immediate future; perceive them, gauge them and form plans of counteraction and neutralisation before anyone else has even finished their coffee break. Rufus' nose for danger is bringing him a scent of almost undetectable menace. It's not going to appear this year. Maybe not even the next. But in Rufus terms, that's soon enough to start working now.

He informed his Turks of this decision, to be rewarded by Tseng's serene acknowledgement of orders, Elena's wide-eyed look of utter innocence that would have been a hell of a lot more convincing if only she remembered true innocents didn't start reaching for a gun, and Reno and Rude giving each other a Heterosexual Lifemate series of communicative eyebrow motions and shoulder movements that he couldn't quite translate (although he thought it might have worked something like this:

Reno: one eyebrow raised, left shoulder shrug. _I think he's lost it, man._

Rude: quick shake of the head, both shoulders rolled back once with feigned negligence. _Boss knows what he's doing. _Quick nod,_ …You're probably right._

Reno: light toss of the head, _Probably? _Low whistle, eyebrows waggling up and down three times. _You _know_ I'm right. Boss is __**nuts**_.

This was followed by several increasingly rapid movement combinations that completely lost him, so he gave up and just glared at them both, supremely irritated that his henchman were capable of talking about him behind his back in front of his face without actually saying a word).

So he lets himself be returned to the chair he loathes, learns to gauge distance and depth accurately with one eye, stops trying to conceal the unsightly discoloration of the Stigma. He practises his shooting, reminds himself of his enemies and allies alike – whose buttons are pushed by what, who can he cajole, threaten, bribe or force to play their parts, whether they know it or not.

"Not too pathetic, sir," Reno sniggers the first time he sees Rufus fussing with the sheet to let only the marked hand be properly seen, to shroud everything else.

His plans for Jenova can wait awhile, until the enemy, whoever – _whatever_ – it may be, moves first, gives themselves away. He has plenty of time in this chair of his. Let someone else put the spark to the tinder; he can wait out the ensuing explosion, the helpless cripple, and when the time is right, sweep the board clean.


	6. Asphodel Meadows

**(Asphodel Meadows)**** (The Countdown)**

Cloud would have said, back when he was fresh from Nibelheim, don't gamble with Reno; he's a friend of Loki. He'd have said it with the particular stresses of the Nibel accent, and smiled self-consciously in that awkward way a rural boy gets among city company, particularly talking about gods and superstition. In places like my hometown, a statement like that would get nothing but a nod of acceptance and a wary look to the one remarked upon, but in the city you'd get an incredulous look and a contemptuous laugh.

But yeah, Reno is a friend of Loki. Hell, the god of trickery probably stood as his godfather or something, what with his talent with cards.

I had a lot of good times playing cards with Reno waaaaaay back when, both of us cheating outrageously, periodically flinging our cards down to accuse the other of some sleight of hand, and when we'd finished (Reno always won, in case you were wondering; he once commiserated with me on the fact that I had the worst poker face he'd ever seen) we'd compare notes.

Card games aren't the only arena in which Loki is Reno's friend.

The source of all trickery is in misdirection – while your audience's attention is focussed on the obvious, you perform the real trick right beneath their noses. This is an essential part of Reno's nature as a Turk. He can get the job done with all eyes on him, and while everyone's focussing on the big stuff, the flashy stuff he's famous for, he can go behind their backs and do countless little jobs twice as important that they'll never notice and he'll never get the recognition for.

It's why he and Rude are the perfect team. Their opponents tend to keep a good eye on Reno, redheaded, flashy, in-your-face Reno with the cattle prod, and Rude takes advantage of this tendency and nails them in the back of the head (quite literally in many cases. The first thing their opponents did when they greeted Hades was say "But he was right in front of me!")

They're the tag team of the century. They go together, they just… _fit_. Reno and Rude. Just rolls off the tongue, don't it? (Like chalk and cheese. Sea and sand. Ba and Boom!

—Rude and Obnoxious, Sephiroth says irritably, glaring at them both. His tetchiness might have something to do with Reno's infamous poster advertisement for 'Mako Shampoo', the one where Seph was half-naked and covered in suds. Holy, was it entertaining to see the double-takes from the executives when they caught sight of it on the message board. If I hadn't supplied the photo I'd have believed it too; Reno's talent with photo editing is also incredible.)

"I don't believe this shit," he mutters to Rude now, tapping the electro-rod (regrettably uncharged) against his leg. Rude, never famed for his loquaciousness, grunts. "I mean, Holy," he continues, oblivious to Rude's lacklustre response, "the Boss is nuts, playing dress-up, Strife is nuts, playing delivery boy-" he blinks. "Shit, what _is_ the saviour of the world s'posed to do when he's finished saving the world anyway?" Rude shrugs disinterestedly, keeping a sharp eye on Reno because he recognises the warning signs – that tapping? It means Reno is itching to give someone a taster of what death in the electric chair would be like. The sudden tangents? That's Reno trying to distract himself from aforementioned urge. The frequent running of his hand through his hair? It means Reno's brain is rebelling against serious thought and Rude needs to think of a way to entertain him, otherwise they can say goodbye to half the city.

"Well, whatever." He waves a hand negligently. "We're _Turks_. And he tells us we're supposed to just wait around and-"

"…Microwave." Rude says.

Reno's train of thought is completely derailed and crashes into the concrete barrier that is Rude-speak, just as Rude intended. "Uh?" he says, but Reno hasn't been Rude's partner since humanity crawled out of the primordial soup for nothing. Whenever Rude says something aloud, Reno _knows_ something entertaining is about to occur. Anticipation automatically starts screaming through every cell in his body.

"Popcorn." Rude says, just to make absolutely sure Reno will listen. Now Reno is on red alert. Rude always has the best ideas. Rude gives him a Look over his sunglasses. He smirks. "Boom," he says.

Reno is delighted. How well Rude knows him – explosions are his favourite.

**—**

The ring is waiting for her as she enters the church.

Of course he wouldn't give it to her in person. No one would steal it, after all – other than AVALANCHE, only people who desire protection enter this place – and he had to know that on this day of all days she would visit. Then she wonders if it isn't a gift to Aeris, rather than her.

It's striking. Ugly, but striking. It's another version of the stud in Cloud's ear, but it's too small even for Cloud's slender fingers, and considerable effort has been made to slim and refine the wolf's features, so it lacks the bolder, chunky look of Cloud's ornaments. It has none of the elegance, the refinement she would choose in a ring for herself, but she admires the delicacy of the wolf head's depiction, the tiny fangs, the gentle curve of the muzzle, the steady eyes, the liquid-silver sweep of the stylised fur.

It's still a man's decoration, too big and gaudy for her, but she can learn to like it, if it means what she thinks it does.

Wolves are pack creatures, she thinks, running a thumb over that mistrustful face, they need companions, and the thought appears that if Cloud is a wolf, he too must be a pack creature. It occurs to her that this is what the wolf in his ear was saying all along that she was too deaf to hear. However much he might try to pull away, Cloud is a member of the pack they formed, and while a pack may disband in times of plenty, in times of need it is a matter of survival to be among friends.

_I'll come back_, the wolf says to her now. _I belong here_, it says. _You are family._ _Be patient_. _I need you._

Tifa never liked wolves much. Their mournful howls used to keep her awake at night, and she once thought they were spirits that had gotten lost on their way across the mountain, to spend the rest of eternity calling for new souls to show them the way.

Her hands betray her, reaching for the ring and slipping it on.

Against her will, she begins to imagine a child, his hair and her eyes, or maybe the other way round, a child that will grow up slender and slight, a mountain child's height without the sturdy thick body made by generation upon generation of mountain living. (In Nibelheim, such children as she imagines would be considered frail and weak, would likely die in their first five winters.) She holds in her mind a baby, a newborn. She can feel its (his her) weight on her hip, the soft wisps of pale hair, the smoothness of skin new made and without scars. She can see trusting blue eyes, clouded like a May sky, and maybe they'll darken and soften, become like the earth, warm and welcoming, or maybe they'll lighten and sharpen, become like the sea, smooth as glass but treacherous underneath, all hidden currents and killing cold. She breathes in that unique infant smell, wraps the warmth of its presence around her like a shield.

My child, she thinks, and feels her heart break at the hopelessness of it, my child, my son, my daughter – my baby. She's never wanted anything so badly in all her life, but she kills that baby in her mind, and buries it without a prayer. She has learnt well – dreams are dangerous, deadly things.

(—Go for it. Reach for the impossible, Aerith whispers.

—We're breaking them into pieces, I say, even as Sephiroth overrides me:

—We are dead. We do nothing. It is their own choices that condemn them to suffering. So let them suffer.

—You're a fine one to talk of pride, Aerith hisses.

—Did I mention pride? His voice is like the crack of the whip, the sharp hiss of air splitting moments before the skin is broken.

—It was implied, she insists.

—Oh? He murmurs. I wonder sometimes at the sarcasm my superior can cram into one syllable.

—_Children_. Enough, I snap. I'm still thinking of Tifa, cradling that imaginary baby like a little girl with a doll, desperate to grow up. Ah, when we were alive, I was never the sensible one!)

She won't think on it again, will leave the maybe-child here beneath the yellow flowers, just another sacrifice to the altar they've made of the past.

(You can sense despair in this place – it tastes like fresh blood on your tongue, feels like a bird brushing its broken wing against your face as it spirals down. Tifa's despair echoes and throbs like a scream, like the wail that follows the crack of breaking bone.

—Hey darlin', giving up ain't your style. Have a little faith.) "I love you," she says aloud, and her voice breaks with the pain of it, the pressure of those little words that she's kept locked inside for so long. Here where she cannot see his face she can say it without flinching.

(Ah, but what else can he do, our Cloud, but run away from such high regard?

—What else indeed, Aerith says, and I know then that she's not going to stand for it any longer.

(You're fighting a losing battle, sweetheart.) She rocks herself gently, back and forth, and I wonder if she is thinking of a life she could have had, if she too is thinking of a child with Cloud's pretty eyes or wild hair, and I try not to feel jealous. I am dead, I tell myself, but she was alive and so was he.)

"Wolves," she says, looking back at the ring, pushing away her gentle delusions with the reality of its weight, letting her words drop like stones into the stillness. "_Wolves_. Cloud, why couldn't you just _say _it?"

The flowers are silent, and she stands there for a long time, tracing those wild features, that fierce smile. It doesn't say _I love you_; it doesn't talk about eternity and true love and marriage, like a normal ring would have in its place. It says, _this absence isn't forever_, and that's worth a thousand such declarations.

—

The mess of popcorn and microwave parts would be horrific to the uninitiated, but all surviving Turks are well inured to such sights. Tseng steps carefully (prissily) around the popcorn.

"I expect this to be cleaned up before tomorrow," he says silkily, in his best 'I-am-NOT-impressed' voice.

"Or what?" Reno drawls, gathering popcorn into little piles and flinging them up into the air. Rude coughs experimentally from over the other side of the room where he is creating a mechanical monster worthy of Hojo – a terrifying amalgam of vital microwave innards, duct tape and spare wiring. Reno takes the hint and pastes on a look of contriteness that would fool nobody, least of all Mr. Hard-Ass himself

(—Bitter, Zachary? Sephiroth murmurs, and it's so like something The Real Sephiroth would say, and so like the way he would say it that my heart leaps into my throat.

—Oh no, I say airily. —Bitter? _Me_? Nah. You know me, can't hold a grudge to save my life. Just 'cause, you know, he was involved in _killing me_…

If this were the same Sephiroth that was my friend, the same Sephiroth who told me I was jumping around like a little kid on the way to Nibelheim, he'd raise an eyebrow and smirk at me, a particular expression that always goaded me into continuing, which meant my answers lost cohesion and fell apart in the face of his amusement.

But this is not my friend. He turns away in utter disinterest, as if I had said nothing at all. Or as if he had.)

"Or you can explain to Elena why there will be no microwave burritos."

(…I will admit, Tseng can play with the best of them. I make obscene gestures at his back anyway.)

Rude's little mechanical monster gives a '_ding'_ and starts dragging itself jerkily towards Reno. Reno abandons the popcorn in an instant. "Come to papa!" he says delightedly, grabbing the machine and attacking with a screwdriver. Tseng sighs irritably and glides out of the room.

—

Reeve Tuesti can't remember who he is. Every time he thinks he knows all he has to do is look at the little mechanical cat, dumb and dead on his desk, waiting, and he doubts it all. All his years in ShinRa, attempting in his own, special brand half-hearted way to help the unfortunate counts for nothing when placed against that thrice-damned cat. And worst of all, Cait Sith is nothing. Ignoring the stuffed mog, he wasn't the most visible member of the team, he wasn't important, he wasn't useful (even his limit breaks pushed the boundaries of ineffectuality and pointlessness: Reeve was never very good with slot machines), he wasn't much of anything at all save frequently annoying and occasionally treacherous

Yet everything Reeve has ever done pales in comparison. It isn't _fair_.

(We don't even bother justifying this with an answer. Of course it isn't fair, but since when has that mattered?)

He knows the arrangements, of course he does. He's not sure why the team has reached the conclusion it has to commemorate such a day (—it was a successful conclusion to a campaign? Sephiroth inquires, most definitely not of the bureaucratic mindset) when there is so much work to be done, and truth be told, he's grateful the end of the world didn't arrive and all, but that doesn't change the fact that he still has work to do and the city is still ruined and he was never a real part of the team anyway. Not Reeve.

He lets Cait go in his stead.

It's okay. It doesn't matter. It was never him they wanted in the first place. He's the man behind Cait, behind his odd regional brogue and grandiose gestures; it'll be as good as being there.

He watches the airship leave before turning back to his work, empty and mourning.

He scrawls a dozen signatures, stops, and wishes Cait was still there, that he could run his fingers over the tips of his fool's crown, trace the white bib and bold markings of his face, a soothing habit that has become automatic whenever he feels alone, or, alternately, hemmed in by us.

He doesn't sleep much anymore. He doesn't have the time for it, or the use for it – he has penance to do, plans to make; his world is blueprints and department meetings, like it used to be so long ago when he coaxed Midgar into the world like the proudest of midwives.

Paperwork. He's too busy to celebrate his part in saving the world because of paperwork.

(But then, it was always like that in ShinRa. Man, even though he was a total neat freak the only time Seph ever saw over his desk was that one time I… accidentally… sparked off a fire materia. Whew, it went up like… well, like highly flammable stacks of paper. 'Course, he kicked my ass into next week, but the fact that he then went out and bought me one of those huge tubs of cookie dough ice cream kinda undid the gesture.

And anyway, at least we learnt the sprinkler system needed fixing.)

He talks to Cait sometimes in the dark, watching the moonlight on his tiny mechanical face, feeling a rush of paternal adoration for this little creature that is so precious to him. In daylight he is mocked by his child's blank, vacuous eyes and deathly stillness and he hates him with the helpless fury of the overlooked, but in the dark he can't see his own faults reflected in that shiny cheap crown.

In the monitor he sees through Cait's eyes, and wonders when Cait Sith stopped being a toy and started being him.

"What shall we do tonight, Cait?" he asks the empty air gently, unconsciously mocking a child's TV show.

"The same thing we do every night, Reeve," he informs himself in Cait's voice, the glint in his eyes perhaps humour, perhaps malice, "Try to take over the world!"

He raises a glass to us, gulps it down like water. He doesn't talk, he doesn't cry, he watches nothing through the window and wishes hard. His hand reaches out absently for Cait and his nails cut his palm when they feel nothing but air and curl into a fist.

—

Vincent dreams, and his dreams are no better than his thoughts, complex webs of soot and barbs, chains of hideous memories. Here and there he spots Lucretia, but it's not the Lucretia he wishes to see. Now and then he wanders into someone else's nightmare, and every so often he finds himself lost in the ShinRa Mansion, following our ghosts as we dart from room to room (—Here! Can you play the piano Mr. Valentine-vampire-man? This way! Jenova's got the munchies in that room, better stay away, she infects!).

Vincent is nightmare made flesh, and he spends a long time here in his own head, where he is less a monster and more an incident of the dream. Chaos stirs and rouses itself to walk beside him in the dark, black wings cut from night and the shape beneath creation as they stretch to cover the world. Chaos speaks in a voice like antique silk, faded and worn, laughs like the rustling of dry leaves on dying trees, moves like satin trailing over a gravestone, like a couerl, always ready to spring.

This is a place where Vincent can look into the heart of himself and feel no fear. Perhaps he can even feel affection for Chaos here, because Chaos is a piece of him, and that cannot be denied without bringing harm. So both of them are free and content in moments like this, trailing through the empty rooms where they were born and shaped.

(If I were honest, I'd explain that there are days when I hate Vincent Valentine. There are days when I can't stand to be anywhere near him, Valentine with his flashy red cloak, his woe-is-me sighs, his nauseating cloud of self-pity and his arrogant insistence in putting all the sins of the world on his shoulders. There are days when he tilts his head just so, or makes a gesture exactly right and all I see is Sephiroth and I just can't help thinking, _why couldn't it have been _you_, you useless, self-pitying waste of coffin space? Who the fuck would mourn you_ _in the same situation?_

If I were honest I'd explain that I blame him: I blame him for sleeping away 'in penance' when he could have done something, could have helped Seph, could have helped _us_, screaming half a hallway away. I blame him for Cloud, for Cloud's black sleeve and his bowed head. I blame him for teaching Cloud the finer points of maintaining an angst-a-thon, for being an illustration in torment, for being such a fucking prima donna.

If I were honest, I'd tell you that I despise Vincent Valentine-

But I don't.)

Vincent wakes, and he can't tell if he's woken or if he is still dreaming. It gets difficult, when you spend so long in the kingdom of dreams and wandering the land of nightmare. (I'm telling you, they'll _never_ get the angst stains out of the walls.)

He is ready now to face what he has to on this day – night even, for the evening star is already shining. Chaos will be peaceful, as it often is after these dreams of communion Vincent deliberately forgets. Chaos is in mourning too.

Vincent doesn't think further on this blessing, just accepts as he begins to walk, pulling the cloak tight around him.

Red is colour of passion, the colour of anger and love and blood. Vincent keeps the red cloak because he believes it to be the colour of his sin (Sephiroth remarks absently that he should keep it just because the colour suits him). The red today should stand for new beginnings, for new birth, it should be the colour of a freshly unfurled rose, the colour as a new creature is born in the blood of the old. Vincent keeps the cloak, but he doesn't change the meaning.

He needs to move, before the others leave him behind. They are gathering today, their little misfit family, and no matter what he is, Vincent honours his promises, and the bonds he lets himself keep.

It's not something he'll ever admit to himself, but he wants to find home in their welcome arms, he wants for people who know what he is and don't fear him. He doesn't want to be alone tonight, knowing his son is dead.

(Let me give you three words that will sum Vincent Valentine up: Poster Boy. _Issues_.)

—

Tseng stares. Elena stands on tiptoe to peek over his shoulder, and has to drop back down and clamp a hand over her mouth to stop her laughter.

Rude is gasping in a corner – I'd say he was having a heart attack, except that Turks are like cockroaches; when a building falls on 'em, more damage is done to the building – having cleaned the room from top to bottom in fifteen minutes flat. (Ha! And you thought Turks were only good for making a mess. They can clean it all up too.)

Reno is sitting in the middle of the room, his suit even more rumpled than usual. With a proud, anticipatory grin he pushes a new button and The Monster twitches. Lights blink. It whirrs. "Tseng – iz a – jerk," it manages, before self-destructing in a fit of blue sparks.

"Damn," Reno says mournfully, watching it disintegrate, just before Rude drags him out of the way of the chair Tseng throws at his head.

—

Yuffie loves forests. Adores them. _Real_ forests, not the skeletal corpse-trees surrounding the Forgotten City, 'cause those were just _weird_, and she wouldn't be surprised to find Vinnie in there; it seems the sort of place to appeal to his morbid nature (coffins, I ask you). No, she loves forests where the trees are brown-skinned and green-leaved, forests of multi-layered shades of green and humming with life – even those stupid birds she absolutely _despises_ when they give the dawn chorus before the sun has even had the grace to put in an appearance, chirpy little jerks. Best of all, they are the only place where there is no whisper of home.

There are no real wooded areas in Wutai. No towering forests, no vast jungles, only meagre, sparse woods scattered like forgotten tears in hard to access places. Wutai is stark beauty – carven mountains and wide plains and even the _beaches_ of her land are harsh, the sand gritty and rough, nothing like the soft dunes of the Costa del Sol that she spent hours running up and down barefoot during her first days there, squealing with delight, absolutely fascinated. And everywhere her countrymen and women have fought and died to preserve them, all for her father to reduce her country to a tourist trap: no fight, no honour, no heart, no soul.

She loves her country, fervently believes in the honour and glory of her people and her people's land, but her duty as Kisaragi's daughter and only heir is a heavy one, and she fled to the forests to try and lessen it. Materia is what she came to enemy's land for (it represents ShinRa, the power of the Planet that ShinRa harvested and tamed and used against her country, the power that was denied to them with their defeat, and there's nothing like stealing something that was used against you and turning it on its creator) but the feeling of peace and the illusion of freedom from the ties of honour she professes to deny is why she stayed.

Yuffie's problem is actually that she feels honour too deeply. Her father, she feels, has ruined her people, her country, taken away their pride, and it doesn't matter how she formed the opinion, it's her _duty_, her _responsibility_ to find a way to give that pride back.

(—A heavy duty for a mere girl, Sephiroth remarks, absolutely indifferent, nerveless asshole that he can be)

Forests are indescribably real to Yuffie. There's something about their vitality, the sense of age, the plethora of sights and sounds and scents that entrances her, that makes her feel comfortable, just a little piece in a very big picture, welcomed in a place far from home.

She chose them as her ideal place of ambush because they were ideally suited her abilities, provided shelter and shield, let her dart into the fight and exit just as quickly if things got a little too rough (not that it ever did, she insists). She chose them secondly for how she could slip so easily into the heart of the enemy country, sheltered by their own plant life, and that appealed to her vengeful side, artfully hidden with childish exuberance and light-fingered mischievousness.

She likes to bounce up and down, feel the earth give a little beneath her boots, knowing it will always push her back up. She likes to stand at the top of cliffs and shout until her voice is hoarse. She likes to stare at the sun until everything has a black after-image. She likes to live and live and _live_.

This is the Planet at its best, and when she flies in that god-awful contraption Cid still insists is the best way to travel or drives inside those tiny, shaking boxes on wheels she feels like she's willingly cut a little of herself away. She always feels sick, surrounded by metal, the smell of machinery, and if the gods wanted people to get to places faster than the speed of their own legs, well that was why they made chocobos, wasn't it?

Her gods are in the soil and the mountain and the river and the air and when she visits Aerith's church (altar) she can't help demanding to know just how could anyone _live_ in Midgar? How could anyone _like_ being surrounded on all sides with metal and glass and smoke without even the meagre comfort of a potted plant to remind them what life was? To remind them, _Life is this_. No wonder Cloud goes to the Church. He's a mountain boy, a country hick; he ought to know.

Yuffie believes the forests are life, and she's not far wrong. There is no need for the smell of mako and the glittering light to tell anyone who walks here that this place is filled with the same energy.

Yuffie has the way of it. Meteor, everything that preceded and followed it, those events, they're not the be-all end-all of her life. They were pretty incredible events (how many people can say they've helped save the world?) but they're not everything. She made friends, she lost friends and she did some quite unbelievable things, but that doesn't mean she's got to cling to that time forever. Forever is a terribly long time, and she doesn't see why she should spend it all on yesterdays when there are so many tomorrows.

(This is the way it should be. Life is this, life can be this, and it's not doom and gloom and rain clouds all the time, it's fun and laughter and who fucking cares? _Carpe diem_ and all that shit, that's what they should have learned from all this.

Sephiroth mutters something venomous I'm actually glad I didn't hear. I glare at him, and his only response is to snort and grin, clearly entertained at my odd moods. (_My_ odd moods? The schizophrenic bastard!) Out of spite, I lean forward and mutter in Yuffie's ear that at least someone has paid for the injuries to her country.)

Yeah, she nods, suddenly remembering (it's amazing how easy it was to forget, chasing pell-mell across the planet for a cause that really didn't, _shouldn't_ have involved her) that Sephiroth was head of the ShinRa military, that he was the one the old timers used to mutter about and make archaic signs for, to avert the bad luck speaking his name inevitably brought.

("Wutai is not afraid of men," Godo said that day. He looked shrunken and old, nowhere near the dynamic war leader he had been. I glanced at Sephiroth, cool and imperturbable and even I, the closest thing he had to a best friend, felt a shiver of fear that he could reduce such a man as Godo to this. "Wutai is not afraid of gods," Godo said. "But Wutai is afraid of you."

Sephiroth tilted his head back and gave a glacial smile. "Wutai is wise," he said)

And he's dead. Part of the blood-price paid, a piece of tattered honour regained.

"Take _that_!" Yuffie grins, pumping a fist into the air. "I won, you bastard! Yuffie the Materia Hunter rocks!"

(—Like hell, Sephiroth snaps, his good humour vanishing faster than booze in Reno's general vicinity. The baleful glare he sends my way makes me wonder if you can die twice. If you can, I think I'm close to experiencing the most painful method to go about it.)

We spend the least amount of time haunting Yuffie of all those who came into contact with us. When Seph's feeling particularly trapped and therefore, bitter, he attributes this to her idiocy, her inability to comprehend such subjects, her naïvety/youth (same deal as far as he's concerned), her utter insignificance in the group, the friendship, the Grand Scheme of Things and so on and so forth. Personally, I think it's because Yuffie, of the entire group has her head screwed on reasonably straight. Dead is dead, in Yuffie's opinion, so ghosts don't trouble her. She controls her memories; they don't control her.

(—I could change her mind, Sephiroth murmurs thoughtfully, before slipping away, back to Cloud. Such a faithful little ghost he's made, the man who chafed at even the most reasonable of commands. Aerith gazes after him, troubled, but does not follow – it will only result in later nightmares of her death, what with all the main actors gathered together.)

I like hanging around Yuffie. I wish the rest shared her philosophy - there wouldn't be such a need for us.

(—I like being here, Aerith says defiantly. She lies, I think, as I slip an arm around her shoulders and breathe. This close to her, I can almost accept the cruelty of remaining here.

—So do I. I just don't like to watch people falling to pieces.

—How else can we help heal them if not like this? Aerith demands, and I confess I have no idea. I tell myself I wouldn't leave if I had the choice, and when I think of Cloud and the goodbye I never got to say, the right sort of leaving I meant to have, I know I wouldn't.

—Look, Aerith murmurs. —Cid is here.

So he is. And they'll gather together, pieces of a whole, and tear the scabs off barely healed wounds, dig deep into remembrances that go a little too deep to be helped by sharing them.

Ah, shit, what does it matter? We'll be there, like we always are.)

—

I've never been to Cosmo Canyon before, dead or alive (Planet, that sounds stupid. True, but stupid). I'm told the flame of Cosmo Canyon has been burning for centuries. I've never been big on folklore, so I've no idea what the significance of it is, but it's probably something about keeping the darkness of evil at bay or something. (—Zack! Aerith protests shrilly, watching aghast as I jump the flame, not quite able to lose completely the mortal sense to avoid stupid risks. Sephiroth smiles wanly, before sitting cross-legged before it, watching his sins unfold in the steady light and flickering shadow.)

Nanaki enters our line of vision, only the soft sound of the pads of his feet striking the dusty ground giving his presence away. He turns his good eye towards us, barrettes glittering as they catch the light, the planes of his leonine face thrown into sharp relief. "What purpose have you here?" he rasps, a hint of a throaty growl at the end of his enquiry. (I falter mid-leap, dropping into the heart of the flames, causing them to flicker. Aerith claps a hand to her eyes in horror, or perhaps exasperation. Sephiroth raises an eyebrow, but doesn't lift his gaze from whatever scene he sees playing itself out in the fire. —Er, I say brilliantly, looking around desperately for help)

"I won't repeat myself," he says softly (suddenly those fangs look very sharp, the way they glint in the light. Sephiroth raises his head at last, and meets Red's golden eye with a steely gaze of his own. In the wavering firelight his eyes are dilated enough to look almost normal.

—What business does a ghost have anywhere? He asks, unperturbed.)

Nanaki sits back on his haunches, the fur bristling slightly on his shoulders, tail twitching with agitation but to any passing townsmen outwardly serene. "You should move on," he states unemotionally, eye rolling to focus on Aerith. We're not sure as to the implications of that statement. (—It's not that simple, I tell him)

"It's very simple."

(—I wish.)

* * *

A/N: Loki decided that even if he wasn't a Summon like Odin (_especially_ as he wasn't a Summon like Odin), he was bloody well going to sneak in somehow. Nibelheim being Norse in origin, it seemed appropriate that they kept him in mind. (This then brings up the question, well why is Hades the God of Death then? Hades is present in the game and therefore had precedence over Hel, the Norse goddess of death and the underworld.)

Besides, with so many pantheons on offer, why stick to just one?


	7. Lethe

**(Lethe) (In-Between)**

("Stay where you belong.")

_Strife, do you see that?_

* * *

(—What if, Sephiroth asked quietly one night, —I want to leave? What if... what if I want to leave all this behind, let go and be whole again?

He already knew the way the leaves were falling.

—You can't, I said.

He was staring at Cloud's sleeping face as if he'd never seen it before, his eyes empty with something a little like fear. —Why not?

—Because... because even if you did, Cloud would still call you back. Even if it weren't your wish to live again, it would be Cloud's.

I didn't look at him, at them, because I refuse adamantly to have to choose between them. One day I'll have to, but that day wasn't then, nor has it come yet. I think I know which one of them it is I'll be talking to when that choice comes, because I have a pretty good idea of whom Aerith is going to stay by, and I think it'll be the right choice. After all, Cloud is still alive, he can still do damage to himself.

And all of sudden, not looking at them, it was just so _obvious_ I couldn't believe I hadn't figured it out before. I turned back. —You know what we are, Seph? I said. —We're just memories, and memories don't get a choice in these things.

_Eidolon_. Empty shadow. Hollow Idol. What's left after a person dies – not a soul, not the actual person; literally, a mere shadow of the person they were when alive.

He frowned, swiped irritably at an errant lock of Cloud's hair, slapped away the grimace on his young face (_little more than a __**child**_, the memory of a sane Seph had said, startled and shamed) – the puckered brow and drawn lips of a child about to bawl. —_Why _not? He repeated, more impatience this time in the sound. —Why can't he let me go?

I spread my hands helplessly —...I don't know.

Aerith smiled, and the smile was bitter and belonged to somebody, something else. —I (we) do, she (they) said. —You give meaning. You... _define_ him. God, yes?

—I don't want to! he screamed at her; yet his hand closed on Cloud's shoulder, his fingers digging in as if the touch would anchor him, restore his composure. —I don't want- but then he could no longer speak, choked on his anger and his words because he couldn't explain it any more than anyone else.

She (they) laughed at him. He bared his teeth like a cornered wolf and something in him snapped, flew apart.

Something inside Cloud snapped, clicked together. The echo of a shard of him being put inside where it belonged hung in this place and trembled. Sephiroth stilled, reached out and traced the jagged edges of his identity with fascination, restlessly charting every delusion, every memory, every word he'd ever uttered, cutting his fingers to the bone on Cloud's confusion. —What if, he whispered, even softer —what if _he_ wants to stay? Will you send him back, the way you do me?

—Yes, they told him. —He has a job to do.

—He has a job to do because I have one. If I stopped, and he no longer wanted to fight, why couldn't he stay? Why wouldn't that work? He already knew the answer, but he chose not to listen. Typical Sephiroth.

—He has a job to do, they repeated.

—…but one day he won't, Sephiroth said, in a statement as near a question as he has ever managed. _We will get there._ —One day, he said, —he'll be in this place again and there'll be a place for him here.

—Maybe.

They meant no, but Sephiroth refused point blank to listen anymore. He'll be disappointed and hateful when he finally accepts it (in a year, a decade, a century), he'll tell himself that they lied to him but they don't need to, not when he's willing to do it himself.)

* * *

_The stars are falling, I can catch them in my hands…_

("What do you want?")

* * *

A truth: life consists of trying to forget about the skull beneath the skin.

You think, because you hear it so often, that it's possible to forget about it, but it isn't. Sometimes that's a relief – when all else is lost there remains always, _always_, one tiny spark of hope, and in the labs that hope was tied up in the realisation that it was still possible for me to die.

The worst of Hojo's torture was the conflict he managed to instil in my own thoughts – the desire to die, the fear of it. A marvellous piece of psychological torture that I'm sure was accidental.

A truth: all greatness is shadowed by cruelty. To be great is to burn like a supernova, and lose sight of human faces in the glow.

(Sephiroth was my God too; I stood close by and reflected his light, a moon to the sun, half of me always cold, half of me always burning.)

This is the truth that no one wants to think about – Sephiroth is life. Twisted, fucked up, and warped beyond recognition. Life taken to its extreme. Life that can exist when the world is dust. Life that clings on until the moment the stars go out. Alone, his physical body shattered, that's nothing. His spirit, that's another matter all together. Willpower is the key, the solution and the means, and Sephiroth, oh, Sephiroth has the will to make God bend a knee.

This is the reason some succumb to mako poisoning and some don't. This is the reason some are destroyed and some mutate and some adapt. Pure, unadaltered will.

There was nothing and nobody that could make Sephiroth do what he didn't want to. He played ShinRa's game because he could, because he had nothing better to do, because he knew they couldn't force him to do anything. I remember, near the end of the war (funny how the Wutai-Midgar part preceding gradually got left out. Everyone knew what you meant when you said 'the war' – everyone had lost someone) he threatened to stay there, in the country he destroyed. He waited for them to twitch the lead they'd put about his neck, and when they did he felt the weakness in it. He laughed like a madman (and yet nothing like what I heard in the basement). He'd fought them not because he wanted to fight; he didn't care. He just wanted to see if they could tame him.

They couldn't.

He stayed with the Company because he couldn't see another way. It was written in his blood and thoughts and bones that he needed ShinRa, needed the mako they provided, didn't need the hassle running would give him. He stayed because he could do some good in any capacity, and in time he forgot his contempt for them that they couldn't make him bow.

Sephiroth had power. He was beyond belief, beyond understanding, simply _beyond_. The only thing that Sephiroth ever needed was the Masamune in his hand and the decision in his mind. If he committed himself to something, he did it, no half measures involved. All the ambition, all that intelligence and ability and energy and drive, there was _nothing_ he couldn't do.

He let himself fall.

(_SephirothMasterGod_)

He _chose_ this. Sephiroth who could force God to kneel at his feet, Sephiroth who could bend the stars to his purpose, Sephiroth who could summon meteors, Sephiroth who called upon supernovas, _he chose to fall_.

He chose this path. Jenova's collar, he put it upon himself of his own free goddamn will.

(_BetrayerFalseIdolWeakling_)

Maybe he did it just to see if she could do what ShinRa could not. If she would force him or if he would overpower her. Maybe he was bored.

Maybe, maybe-

He just didn't know how strong he was. We knew. We were outside, we watched and marvelled and fell to our knees. Sephiroth, he knew he could destroy nations, he knew ShinRa couldn't cage him, but he also knew what we did not, of the labs, of the memories of his screams he left in the walls there.

When you've been weak once, (_I am the master of my own illusory world_) no matter how strong you become, that memory stays with you.

("I will destroy you; I will turn you all to dust, for Mother…")

Like I said, there's plenty to be afraid of.

Something lost: Sephiroth's understanding, Aerith's sweetness, my mercy.

Something found: Sephiroth's knowledge, Aerith's caution, my forgiveness.

* * *

_The stars…!_

("What about this planet?")

* * *

A secret: Cloud keens softly in his sleep some nights, and Sephiroth will card his fingers through his hair and whisper secrets like pouring poison into his ear.

Another: Cloud will laugh quietly (sometimes; very rarely) in his sleep, and Sephiroth will lie down beside him as if they're sharing a coffin, and curse him in every language he knows and then some, hand closed tight enough around his upper arm that it would break, if they could still touch.

(For anyone else, a curse would go like this: May all the sins of the world be hung on you. May the gods turn their backs to you. May you be exiled to the outer reaches of the universe, beyond mercy or compassion. May you die the most agonised death possible. May you scream for all eternity.

But Sephiroth knows Cloud, and knows what would hurt him most.

—May you live forever, he says softly into his ear.)

* * *

_Stand with me. Let us sail this universe, let us find the challenges out there (let us be destroyed at last letuscometodust) Oh, my puppet, what wonders are among the stars!_

("I pity you.")

* * *

When I was a child, my mother spoke to me of totems, of creatures that reveal your inner heart.

(I was an arrogant little brat; I sneered and mocked my mother's, my hometown's beliefs. I went to the big city and I slipped into it as if I was born there with my cynical smile and my easy disregard for people beneath me. I lied when I talked to Cloud about Gongaga as if I missed it, I lied when I told him wistfully about my mother's words on totems, I lied with an affectionate smile when I pretended I understood his weeping for the mountains.)

But! When I was a child, I fell in love with wolves and I never fell out of love with them.

(How could I? Soldier that I am, killer that I am, how could I not worship?)

Yeah, okay, some part of it was egotism – didn't exactly want to be represented by a rabbit now, did I? (Although, those monstrosities in the North... tell me you wouldn't be scared of rabbits after you'd had one of those sink their teeth dangerously close to a delicate piece of male equipment.) But there was just something about wolves that spoke to me.

There were wolves around Gongaga. Well, not actually around Gongaga, jungle was the wrong type, and too close to human habitation, but you could hear them singing out on the plains. The first time I heard a wolf call I felt the same thing I felt when I saw my next-door neighbour, who I swore (at the advanced age of eight) I would marry one day. The difference was, she was an ideal, and the wolves and their song was a reality beyond me, beyond everything. Wolf song was the thread that tied my life together, from child to man, from innocent to soldier. They spoke to me. Nobility. Purity of purpose. Perfect adaptation for their life. Sociability. Solitude. Vicious. Affectionate. All those qualities wrapped up in that beautiful shaggy fur and steady gold eyes.

I studied wolves when I was training for the military. I'd watch how a wolf moved, acted; its hunting habits, its sleeping habits, everything. I felt that wolves were the perfect example of what I should learn from, being a higher example of evolutionary splendour than any clumsy, noisy human being, no matter how cool and hard-ass my instructors were. I taught myself to move the same way (no, no, not on four legs), I taught myself to sleep lightly and wake regularly, like a wolf (now _there _was a _real_ test of willpower, forcing myself to leave my nice comfortable warm safe bed in the mornings...) I taught myself to take care of my surroundings, to notice little signs I'd miss otherwise. Tracks, animal behaviour, that sort of thing. I had friends exclaim how wolfish I could be in battle, stare at me worriedly when I grinned after a kill, baring my teeth as my totem might.

(I never told my mother that I believed in her stupid peasant superstition, I never explained to anyone the reason why I decided 'out of the blue' to start studying wolves. I never even admitted it to myself.)

When I was eighteen, and heading to a mission at some small town in the mountains, my little protégé still miserable with motion sickness beside me and my friend watching the campfire with eyes that were blank and uneasy, I put my hands to my mouth and I howled. The sound drifted over the emptiness of the plains and I grinned ridiculously in the face of my superior's disapproval until Cloud lifted his head and howled again for me.

The wolves replied to him. (And I wasn't surprised, truly, but I still felt a flash of something, a fit of... I don't know... of pique, minor irritation that my heart's shape would answer to him and not to me. When Cloud was a child, the mountains were his home, the Nibel wolves his companions; I knew this and I still felt hurt at their rejection.)

"You've been outdone," Sephiroth murmured dryly, amused and understanding, and Cloud flushed slightly at his idol's attention and I scowled at him to show Cloud I didn't mean it and Sephiroth that I did. "Again, Strife," Sephiroth encouraged gently (gently! The number of times that word's been applied to Sephiroth can be counted on half a Wutai warrior's hand).

After a long moment trying to figure out if Sephiroth was joking or not (I couldn't tell either), Cloud rocked back slightly on his heels and howled again, and then I joined in and then the pack that had replied earlier started twisting their voices around ours…

...and then to my great shock, Sephiroth joined in and scared the crap out of all of us, wolves included (possibly).

That was one of the memories I held onto in the labs, clutching it tight until it was worn and ragged and more hole than memory, replaying it over and over in my mind until just the sound of our voices remained. Cloud's wavering, achingly sweet call; Sephiroth's deep, powerful announcement of his presence that automatically became the centre and supporting base for the rest of us; my own rough, tuneless cry of happiness; the uncertain, faintly questioning wail of Private Jenkins (poor dead bastard, lucky dead bastard) and the strange pack calling back to us, weaving in and out.

(Innocence. That's what it was about that moment – the last moment of innocence before the house of cards came tumbling down. I stupidly thought I'd lost it all long ago – that war had taken it from me – and never realised how much more I had to lose.)

They probably thought we were muscling in on their territory or something.

(I wish -

But how foolish.)

* * *

_Strife, Strife who is so strong so weak so double-edged, Strife who is made of contrasts, Strife who is soft and sharp and dust and diamond, shield and sword and pity-filled and merciless, Strife why can't you-_

-see it?

("You just don't get it at all.")

* * *

(—I hate you, Sephiroth whispers one night, every night, as if he were ashamed, as if it was some big secret.

And the funny thing is it really would hurt Cloud to hear it. You'd think, after being stabbed and sliced and used and broken and taken apart that he'd already _know_, but somehow, to hear it is a different thing entirely. Sephiroth, who never spoke of hating and meant it, to hear him _say it_ – Cloud who knows this because I did, it would shatter his already fractured heart.

—You are… he says, and the countless things he doesn't say scream in the silence. Everything, nothing, too much, not enough, life, death and everything in-between, oh god, how he _hates_ him.)

* * *

_You are_

("There's nothing that is not precious to me.")

_everything_

* * *

("What do you treasure most?" Sephiroth says (but it's not Sephiroth, this is just a dream. Oh... wait. Scratch that.)

"When I was a boy, you were my hero," Cloud tells him.

Sephiroth tilts his head a little to survey him. Sitting just outside their imagined arena (today it's a field of unimaginably flat boringness that seems to stretch on forever) and wishing there was popcorn, I think, _weird_.

What an odd response. Does that mean that when Cloud was a child Sephiroth was what he treasured most?

"Oh?" he says aloud. "What an honour," he purrs, and Cloud smiles grimly.

"Well," he says, "it's not like that any more."

Stop. Rewind.

Tomorrow they will fight again and sneer and taunt and demand answers again, because _this_ is what they live for, this was/is/will be the defining moment of their lives and it must be perfect.

Stop. Play.

"_Sephiroth, what do you want?"_)

* * *

_Mine._

("Stay")

_I will never_

("in my memories.")

_let you go._


	8. Elysium

**(Elysium) (The Gathering)**

The flickering light of Nanaki's tail dims with thought. The fur along his shoulders and the back of his neck ripples with agitation as he thinks of us, as we appeared to him. He thinks of Sephiroth's severe face, the dark shadows and orange light on his face, the fire gleaming in his eyes. He thinks of Aeris (so young, she looked so young, had she always been so?), of me (he doesn't know me, but he suspects. It's the way I move, the way Cloud moves, it's the way I tilt my head, the way I scratch the back of my neck, the timbre of my voice that is Cloud's voice when he looks into the distance with a hand on the hilt of the Buster Sword).

He remembers the ghosts of the Gi tribe. He thinks of the touch he felt on the night the Lifestream flowed, the whisper in Aerith's voice. He thinks on the woman Vincent holds enshrined, and he accepts that we are real. He cannot accept we are true.

He thinks of Sephiroth, the scent of _wrongness_ he has grown to associate with him, the stink of mako and Jenova. He thinks of the way he moved, sometimes jerky and awkward, as if fighting every step, sometimes with an inhuman dreaminess like an oil slick spreading and staining everything it touched – and never graceful, as he had been for that one moment he raised his head and asked, _what business does a ghost have anywhere?_

He bares his fangs for a moment, imagines them meeting in pale flesh, but even as the thought occurs his muzzle wrinkles in disgust. Sephiroth is _taint_, his senses tell him, and not being human he knows better than to question them.

He thinks of me, of the way I shift my weight from one foot to the other exactly as Cloud does, the way I frown. He has known all his life how to read the language of the body, whether the prey is strong and healthy or weak and feeble, whether it will charge or run, if it is alert or distracted; in the echo of myself, my behaviour, he sees something wrong. Some of Cloud's gestures, he recalls, are oddly forced and unnatural – there are moments when he expects his body to do something it will not. But on me those gestures look true, look right, and worry gnaws at him like hungry rat to think of something so desperately wrong as someone taking over another person's personality so completely.

He thinks of Aerith, and the iridescent shimmer like the scales of a butterfly wing that hung over her, never clearly visible but always in the corner of his eye. He thinks of the way she looked before the Candle – so much younger than he had recalled her being – with the fire gleaming in her hair and her eyes and no gaping wound, no sign that she had ever been a living woman at all save the tightness in her expression and the weary way she held herself. Nanaki has learnt that humans remember things differently to the way he does, but he cannot recall a time when his memories were not accurate. The discrepancy between his memory of her and the image of her ghost more than anything persuades him that we are not true.

Nanaki's memories consist primarily of scents and sounds, not sights – Sephiroth, for example, is in the scent of danger – the mushrooms one of his human companions might eat, indistinguishable from the good, the smell of a clear blue sky with a storm on the far horizon, frostbitten flesh before it has gone black. Aerith is fresh running water, the close scent of leaves and greenery as it is smelt only from within the thicket.

But now he is blinded, for ghosts have no scent and leave no whisper of their passing but what they wish to give. He can feel our nearness in the tingling in the pads of his feet, the way his hackles rise, the soft whisper of dead voices, but without our scent his world is upside down and incomplete. The emptiness disturbs him far more than any taint would.

"Ghost," he murmurs to himself, his ears flat against his skull, his claws scoring the red earth. "Grandfather," he whispers before he realises he has said it. He stands and makes his way determinedly back to the Candle, to look and ponder and decide if he should broach the subject when his friends gather to look into the light also. "Whatever business you have, ghosts," he says over his shoulder, "I urge you to finish it tonight."

* * *

We split. Just like they'll gather later on, so will we, and in this moment of expectancy we leave each other to visit places and people that are private.

AVALANCHE is like public property – even strangers can walk up and say, hey, I know (of) you – but the places we visit this time are private and personal. It's only right to respect each other's privacy as much as we can. I _think _Aerith visits places in the Lifestream where we, Seph and I, cannot follow. I mean, places that only a Cetra-born can see. I can't go there because I'm human, and Seph can't go there because… well, do I really need to elaborate on that? I _think_ Sephiroth visits what remains of 'Mother' (I'd like to hope not, but I'm a practical kinda guy, and I _know_ Seph is nuttier than a squirrel turd, he isn't exactly capable of distinguishing between 'right', 'wrong' and 'things only someone with the mental equivalent of an amoeba brain would believe').

I visit my parents.

My parents' grief is like matured wine, mellowed with age, and treasured mostly just because it is so old. Each sip is strong with nostalgia and bittersweet; it's no longer harsh enough to knock them down, as it was in the first few years when I stopped writing, stop calling, just _stopped_. They keep the bottle ready and open, but they partake with regret.

My mother's steady eyes are on my father's face, taking in his coarse greying hair, the deep crevasses hard work and heartache have carved on his face. He has the rough, weathered look of a wolf; loss has stripped him of the imperious nature of a king. My father's tired features are watching my mother's hands, stiff with rheumatism, the hands that had held me and caught me throughout my rough-and-tumble childhood. In the centre of the room I stand. Between them the child that was me crawls at their feet. My parents don't see a saviour or a man or a SOLDIER. They don't see the General's friend and war buddy, the scourge of the ShinRa canteen or the best friend of new cadets far from home. No. They see me. Me like nobody else._ Me._

(I was my mother's darling, the thorn in her side she wouldn't have removed for anything. I was my father's pride, the constant exasperation he found only joy in.

I demanded their hearts and they gave them gladly, because they were my parents and I was their child. I cast them aside because I was the type who thought more of himself than his family, because I was going to be a big shot SOLDIER – I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life eking out the same miserable (contented) little existence as my father and his father and his father had, right back to Gongaga's founding. No, my dreams were big and wild and I was full of pride.

I was a good boy, a hero.

I am (was, I _was_) a SOLDIER. A First Class. You don't get to First Class by being polite. You do it by playing the game, by being what ShinRa wants – someone who can do dangerous and difficult jobs and leave their conscience at the door.

But I did love them. They were extension of myself and I loved myself, so of course I loved them.

Even that they could see in me.)

Visiting them hurts. I'm _glad_ that they're dealing, that they can survive without me… but it also hurts that they can. Like every only child I liked to think that I was the light of my parents' lives – that without me the world for them would be a little dimmer, a little emptier. Perhaps it's that I spend such time around people who give new meaning to the word 'obsessive', but to see people – parents, _my_ parents – simply exist, so calm, so serene, their lives going on as before when they lose someone they care about, it's… odd.

—Don't you care? I ask them sitting next to the fire, their tired, work-worn hands clasped together like a promise of eternity.

Heh. Hypocritical, eh?

Well of course it is. I'm only human.

* * *

(I was First Class, I was the best, and I fell, I fell to bullets and exhaustion and despair. I never learned the thing that meant Cloud would live when I was gone.

You can eat pain.

Seven years old, being held down by three bigger, stronger boys of the village, thrashing about like an eel in a net, his right arm caught up and twisted painfully behind his back, Cloud discovered this.

Twist. Yank. Stress placed upon the joints, the bones grinding in the socket. The muted noise of bone scraping bone beneath muscle and skin. Strangled whimpers and startled hisses, but no screams.

You can eat pain. It won't kill you.

A fist low against his spine, hard into his kidneys, and the breath forced out of him with gasp that left him choking, and he thought _iwon'tiwon'tyoucan'tmakemeiwon'tscream._

Oh yes, you can eat pain. Blood and humiliation pooling in your mouth and splinters of thought shattering against each other in your mind, but it's possible to stand it.

He looked up at them and saw them contemplating how far they should go and realising there was no point in trying anything more, he wasn't going to break, though his bones would.

He thought of Tifa, of the curve of her smile and the shine of her hair, he thought of her merry eyes and her hop-skip walk; he thought of the wolf cubs taking their first wobbling steps out of the den on the spire the Nibelheimers called _oude witte_, the bemused disinterest of the pack member left to guard them as they welcomed him with noisy yip-yowls of wolfish laughter; he thought of the sunset between the mountain peaks, the red pink glow and streaks of glorious purple-blue on the underside of the clouds and he thought

(I'm going to live through this.)

And you have it – there, the moment your arm reaches the point of dislocation, the moment before the bones in your finger snap, the moment you look up with blood streaming down your face and twisted pride in your eyes, that's the moment you swallow pain whole and realise it can't kill you.

You don't die eating pain. You die trying to get away from it.

Seven years old and Cloud realised he could eat pain and survive.

I was forced through the most rigorous training regime ShinRa had to offer, I went to war and came out the other side and I never learnt to eat pain. I don't know if that contributed to me being a First Class SOLDIER or not. I learned to ignore it, I learned to drag myself through it, and I learned to yield to it.

I never learned what Cloud did that summer day as he stumbled home with his hair torn out in clumps and his left eye swollen shut and bruises spread over his body like he was a field on which flowers of violence grew.

So I'd lie there in my shiny fucking glass cell and pray under the least of Hojo's mercies to die.

I'd pray for him to keep his dead black eyes on Cloud, and in my pain-weakened state I'd vomit with self-disgust and utter bone-deep revolting relief when he did.

(Of course I told myself I'd never think such thoughts. Of course I begged and offered myself to Hojo's scalpel plenty of times when he came for Cloud.)

I watched him, tears streaming involuntarily down his face at the sheer agony of it, watched as he spat out a vile mix of blood and mako-laced phlegm and choked down pain and fury and fought just to make his ribs expand and his lungs take in air, and my god, all my gods, I'd never seen anything like it. It was like - you ever seen a bird fly into a glass window? Not in Midgar, that's for sure, but I saw it once while I was in Junon. The thud-smack of a soft bone-filled body flying who knows how fast into a solid barrier, and then a softer thump as it hits the ground. There's something terrible about it, watching a bird stunned on the ground, fluttering its wings weakly like it doesn't know why they're attached, uttering pathetic little chirrups of confusion, something terrible about watching it right itself and gain the air once more to circle in utter panic and confusion about where its meant to go.

It was like watching a bird trapped in a glass jar, throwing itself against it again and again until it was possible to hear its wings begin to break, the _crick-crack_ of bones shattering and tendons tearing loose. It was looking at it, at its single-minded focus, and realising with awe that it wouldn't stop until it was out, until it was free and flying, or until it was dead.

And Cloud thinks that I'm the hero.)

* * *

Tonight is the night. It has been all day. They'll gather round the Candle like children round a campfire, waiting, telling stories, sharing laughter, exchanging grief, shedding burdens. It's a Reunion to wipe away the bad connotations the word had been given. It's a coming together and a laying to rest of ghosts, a releasing of burdens.

Maybe it'll even work.

We stand at the edges, out of Red's perceptive sight. We could no more _not_ be here than we could live again. (Bad choice of words – Sephiroth has proved incredibly resistant to the lure of mortality). We're waiting too.

Yuffie is first to leave the Cid's beloved airship, jubilant (and faintly green), a wide grin on her face and materia glinting from its varied hiding places in her clothes. She runs towards Red with a shriek of joy and rapid chatter. Barret argues good-naturedly with Tifa as they walk, Marlene trotting behind them with Cait dangling in her arms. Cid's late presence is announced with the smell of cigarette smoke and the sound of curses, welcomed with broad grins and cheerful teasing.

(Aerith smiles, a beautiful, maternal smile, giving the only support she can. She spins from one of her friends to another, driving out the thoughts of death and darkness Sephiroth brings when he walks into their line of sight with memories of flowers and a pink dress and a kind laugh. None of them think of me except perhaps in passing like Tifa, but that's okay. I'm here for Spike.)

It is an hour or two later when Cloud finally steps out of the shadows, pulling his uncaring façade tight about him like a shield from their friendly worry and concern. He doesn't want to be here; he feels lost, hates the things they automatically bring to mind. But he walks to them anyway, willing away his fear and discomfort with sheer determination. These people _know_ him; there's no mask that reaches deep enough to hide away the boy who pretended to be a SOLDIER from people who already know he's there. (He's been wearing masks too long: he puts it on anyway.)

Vincent is last. His nightmares have been worse lately, closer to the anniversary, and he debated the wisdom of coming here, among people who know them and might unwittingly bring them back. But these are the only people he can share silence with without being expected to divulge what tears at his mind and disturbs his delicate equilibrium, and ultimately, understanding is too great a lure, even for a man who could give Sephiroth lessons in being anti-social.

So he glides into the light at last, the red cloak rippling like water as he moves, and gifts them with a rare smile that assures them that gathering here today is the right thing to have done, no matter how many wounds are reopened or bruises are touched, however much some of them might wish to flee the story they were forced into taking roles for.

The conversation fades despite this, becomes stilted and difficult – it's so much easier when they're not face-to-face, don't have to see what living with the past does to their eyes. At last, one of them makes a joke, and stretched thin endurance and empty words vanish as if there had never been chasms of experience between them, as if Meteor never fell and they are still a little group of people forced to become friends and out to save the world. They sink into these memories, find again the little wishes and dreams they cherished and held close when everything looked to be stripped away. They gather these hopes and imaginings and use them like thread, like a trail of breadcrumbs to retrace the path through a maze of recollections, all the way back to the fragile balance they found within their group. It's like coming home, like finding the puzzle pieces you never realised you were missing because your mind automatically placed them in the picture.

(We drink in the reminisces, savour their grief and laughter and need to remember like a fine wine. It's heady and glorious and for just a moment we're almost alive again.)

It's deeply private, deeply personal, this web stretched between them. It could have been cutting; it could have been chains. It's not. It's the support net that has finally kicked in, caught the high-flying trapeze artists before they hit the ground; it stops them from losing themselves in a story that's too big for them.

They can't articulate it, and instead they show it – a red ribbon (privately, Sephiroth has always considered it an almost personal affront that the item to prevent status effects should be something so girly). It represents so many things, precious beyond words, none of which Cloud thinks about as he fastens it around his arm, his mind peacefully empty in this moment. (Thus was Fenrir chained until the end of the world, binding himself willingly with the silken fetter, to forever await the day he will be freed to devour the world.)

It's infinity wrapping around each arm, all their ties held in a velvet manacle they cherish. Cloud of all people should know better.

(—What do you want? Aerith asks them each, touching their faces, brushing away the darkness. They answer in their own ways, vague truths they can't say out loud for fear of them losing their potency, losing their reality.

_I want to be happy. I want peace. I want to be free. I want to leave that time behind. I want to remember. I want to forget. I want I want Iwant IwantIwantiwantiwant_)

Cloud decides to answer in person, uses the mako and Jenova in his blood to spiral into emptiness, follow the helix inwards to the centre and faces the three of us in the Green. It's foolish, reckless and perhaps we had something to do with it, because we want, we _need_ to see him, this night of all nights. He won't remember. _I want to be forgiven_, he tells us without proper definition and form, still so uncertain, so unsure, (—truly? Sephiroth says) before one day becomes the new and the magic is lost.

(—So do we. Let us go.)

_I can't. I don't know how._

(—I could forgive you, Sephiroth says. —But I won't let you go. Ever. His smile is sharp and his eyes cool. —But you already know that, don't you?

It's not a question.

The choked, exhausted noise Cloud makes drowns in the hollow of his throat as Seph draws him close, to us, into us, wraps his arms around him in a grotesque parody of caring. Sooner or later (later, I hope) he'll join us for real and when that time comes we'll welcome him truly. But for now, we allow Sephiroth to remind him of his own mortality.

Sephiroth holds him like he doesn't know whether to hurt him or cradle him, so he tries both, and Cloud twists away in his arms, in his eyes a fear and vibrancy you find only when you believe yourself close to dying. He is so wonderfully, vibrantly, alive here in our world, no matter what he does with that life, so alive, and that's what we want most of all.

I want to protect that life, I want more than anything to be his shield, to keep him safe. I want him to keep breathing, keep walking and dreaming and fighting, because he's my friend, because a piece of me lives while he lives, because I don't want to have lost the battle for nothing.

Aerith wants him to live and love because that's who Aerith is, because sometimes she's more goddess than girl, because Cloud is her white knight, her champion, even if he failed. She wants Cloud to be happy, wants him to let us go more for his sake than ours, because she knows it's killing him slowly and that's not what she ever wanted him to do, live his life remembering dreams.

Sephiroth, because he's been taught to do things bigger and better than anyone else, wants like a forest fire, voracious and insatiable. He wants every breath Cloud takes, wants to slip into his skin and take them in his stead, because every second Cloud continues to breathe is a second he doesn't have, is a second Cloud has taken from him so he can breathe in his place.

Cloud tries futilely to twist free; he might as well be fighting with a mirror.

He slumps forward, a confession of exhausted defeat, acknowledgement at last that his victory has sapped his strength. —Let me go, he hisses insistently, before it becomes pitiful entreaties. —Please.

Not yet. Not yet.

—Closer, Sephiroth whispers. —Closer still. Set me free, and together we will burn.)


	9. Styx

**(Styx) (The Promise)**

Grandma – who was not actually Tifa's grandmother, or anyone's grandmother, as far as she knew, but a wise woman, a _Völva _(every rural town has one, an elder that keeps the old ways. Gongaga has one. Cosmo Canyon has a whole tribe of them) – explained to her the nature of grief when she was child. Her mother had died a year before and you didn't need to be a wise woman to read on her father's face that grief was sucking away his life. She had sat at her feet and asked her why her Papa sighed so, why it felt like he was drifting away from her in his sorrow.

"Women outlive men," Grandma said. "The All-Father made it thus." Nibelheim's gods are the gods of ice and snow, cruel gods for cruel lands. (There are nine worlds, and the lowest world is the land of Niflheim, the land of mist (of clouds). When Loki engendered Hel Odin cast her into Niflheim, and gave to her power over nine worlds, to apportion all abodes among those that were sent to her: that is, men dead of sickness or of old age...

Fuck, no wonder Nibelheimers are morbid, with that sort of legend behind their home.

Gongaga was laid-back about deities, but we swore more often by Shiva and Ifrit – and very entertaining curses they were too – and sometimes by Titan. You never heard _us_ swear by the fires of Muspelheim or the blood on Odin's spear that ice would cover your open grave until Ragnarok. Brrr.)

She smiled, her heavily seamed face transformed momentarily by the type of understanding age and wisdom alone can bring. "Men like your father can't outlive their women. He'll just start wandering, all the familiar things will be without meaning. He'll give up and he'll fade and sooner or later," she made the gesture to avert the evil eye, "the Lord of the Dead will come for him. Mayhap he'll swim out of his grief long enough to see you to adulthood, but your Papa is one of those men who cannot survive the loss of his wife."

"But—"

"Don't be sad. It's just the way of things, dear." She shrugged her thin shoulders beneath her heavy shawl.

_Just the way of things, dear._ (You'll never meet a harsher, more unsympathetic people as those that live in Nibel's shadow.)

Tifa hated her at the time, but she's beginning to understand it now.

(And what do you know, Grandma was right. He didn't live long. Of course, he was helped along his way by a sharp sword, but then, the natural order of things doesn't take much notice of the particulars. And who's to say it _wasn't _a grief-propelled act of assisted suicide? Just how often do you think the Mayor of any town goes to a Mako Reactor, even when it _doesn't_ contain a nutcase with a six-foot sword?)

This is what she meant – only the weak sicken and die, feasting on grief. Tifa is not weak. Nor is Cloud, however much he tries to convince himself.

This is the way of things: life is for living, not the dead. Leave the dead under the ground or as ashes in the wind, whichever appeals most to you. Remember them if you want, forget them if you must, but live, live, live – don't go looking for them in shadow and shards of memory.

Cloud's mother used to say that. (Ya unappreciative brat, Cloudy, you should listen to your mama; she knew what she was talking about.

—Mother knows best, hmm? Sephiroth laughs delightedly, uninhibitedly.

Is there anyone as familiar with the sensation of dread coiling in the pit of the stomach as me? —That's not- I didn't mean- I try say.

-_you_ try arguing with him.

Shit. Shit. _Shit!_

Aerith hugs me carefully, like I'll shatter. It's a cure-all, I tell you.

Sephiroth sends a glare our way, a resentful, almost bitter look. It's a child's look, a child's glare saying, _I want what you have. _

I have never missed my friend more than I do in this moment.)

When I died – when I found myself _here_ instead of – wherever. When I realised I was bound to Cloud for the rest of his life, when I realised what he'd done, what I'd done, I felt—

I chose it. Never for a second doubt that I chose this. But I - you can't lost all you were and not feel –

Grief. Yes, that's the word. Just like Grandma talked about. I felt grief tear the breath from me; I felt grief close its teeth about me like a black dog's jaws closing about my throat. I was dead. Me, the prodigy, the SOLDIER, the immortal. I screamed, I wept, I raged.

(I should have lived! Me, me, me, ME! How dare you take that from me!)

I'd seen so many people die – enemies, friends, allies – and that was the first time I truly knew grief. I watch Cloud all the time and I see it in his every movement, and I feel it with his every breath and I wish I could choke on my hypocrisy as I ask him if he's ever heard of letting go.

(—Stop it, I whispered one night so long ago, —Just let go. We won't blame you.

Even as I said it I wished I weren't, I wished I was far away, on the other side of the goddamned world instead of standing over Cloud, frowning faintly in his far away dreams with Tifa curled up beside him.

Without Cloud, how will we stay? Without Cloud, what would we become and where would we go? Without Cloud we have no meaning, no purpose, and without us, what would he be, how could we be sure he was safe? Secretly, we like it, his need for us. Secretly we want to keep being the sun and moon and stars of his life. Or not so secretly, in Sephiroth's case, who would prefer Cloud to never think of anything except him.)

I was wrong, I lied back at the Candle, I can't let go any more than Seph can. But one day I _will_ be able to, and one day Cloud will too, and I comfort myself with that thought.

You see, nothing really ends. It just goes round and round, and for some that's the comfort, and for some that's the tragedy.

For us, it just is. You learn to accept, you learn to let go, you learn to let time pass, to let it fill you instead of you trying to fill it. And one day, you open your eyes and you can think of death (yours or theirs it doesn't matter) without pain. That's the moment I'm waiting for. That's the moment when I'll finally get it, and if I can get it, Cloud can too.

You see? Even in my selfishness I can be selfless.

* * *

"Come away now," Tifa says. "Come home with us."

When do you stop trusting the instinct to run? When you do you accept you'll never feel at home, no matter where you go? When do you just make yourself stay?

(_Here. Now._)

He's half-awake, half-dreaming; the world is a dizzying combination of things he knows to be real, and things he knows to be even more real than that.

_Slowly, slowly we will get there._

He lifts his eyes from the flame, nods his head and follows her meekly, docilely. Our whispers are fading from his ears and he'll stay.

(_This presence isn't forever_, the wolf in his ear says.)

* * *

The night after the Anniversary we slip into his dreams. It's not to say goodbye. That word doesn't exist here. There's 'until we meet again', there's 'see you later', there's anything and everything but goodbye, because this is not the end, it never has been.

—It won't always be this way, I murmur to him. —You'll learn to be normal eventually, or learn to pretend to be, and maybe in time you won't be so painful to watch. One day this won't be such a big thing. It'll just be something that happened, a long time ago, and there'll be no pain, just acceptance. In time we'll settle this. Okay?

_Be patient and endure, some day this pain will be useful to you. Slowly, slowly, we will get there._

I don't think Cloud will remember it, but he turns automatically to Seph, like a child seeking approval from a parent. The man himself tilts his head back, and Cloud almost flinches at the disappointment in his eyes (it really wasn't so long ago that Seph was still his idol; it still stings a little, touches the deadened nerves of hero-worship).

—You're stronger than this, he says, disapproval creeping into his voice, and it's the same voice he used to speak to the new SOLDIERs with, stern and forbidding, and if it didn't make you want to be worthy of his approval, to be the best goddamn SOLDIER you could be, you were in the wrong army.

—You can do better. His voice is silk and steel, acid on snow, eating away at shields Cloud has crafted from pieces of me, going straight to the little boy who'd wanted to be a hero and mocking, encouraging, persuading, demanding he get up and prove himself. And of course, Cloud will. It's almost sickening that Sephiroth should still be able to coax these engrained responses out of him.

I can almost see the invisible threads of non-verbal communication running between them as they exchange stares. Why couldn't I have normal friends? Normal friends who don't become mortal enemies and feel the need to skewer each other periodically? Or know the inside of each other's heads so well they don't even need to speak to argue?

Pft. But then they wouldn't be half so fun.

—When I see you next, Seph says aloud for us poor mortals who aren't part of a bizarre relationship with one half repeatedly mind-fucking the other, and thus have no idea how to share thoughts, —You had better be stronger. I don't waste my time on failures.

When Sephiroth was my boss and not completely bugfuck insane, he almost sounded like this. Except he never got the hang of going for the emotional jugular, being completely unconcerned with other people's pesky human feelings; he never understood why mere words could reduce some of his best SOLDIERs to incoherent rages or tears. He strikes the throat now without so much as a blink. The verbal barb cuts deep. It does more than that. It tears a lode wall down.

Failure. It isn't right that one word should have so many meanings. …I could strangle him right now, except I'm never sure one second from the next whether or not he's in the mood to indulge me or decapitate me. Does he have any idea what damage he's doing?

Of course he does, and he watches the steeling of Cloud's features with amused pride.

—Why won't you leave me alone? Cloud asks, and its wry amusement now, as if they are old friends meeting here, instead of villain/hero master/puppet god/former disciple. (Okay, the 'former' part of that designation comes into doubt sometimes; don't question it and you won't get an answer you dislike, understand?

You know what? Watching him smile that way I can see why nobody tries to define their special brand of fucked-up. You just can't, it's an impossibility, like Palmer without lard in his tea, or Vincent inviting a clown to his pity party, or Hojo turning his back on science and greasy hair. It simply can't be done.

Sometimes I think Cloud's as crazy as Seph is half the time. Scratch that. I know he is.)

—Do you want me to? Sephiroth counters, smiling gently in that knowing way that used to irritate the hell out of everyone in the boardroom.

—Do I… he pauses, tries to find the words to what he wants to say. When he tries to speak, the words are tentative and weak – he's never been very good with speaking facing Seph; their disputes have always been physical, are meant to be physical, a matter of the strength of their sword arms, their skill with a blade, the speed and grace they can force out of worn-out bodies – that's the way they like to fight, it's simpler.

—Do I get that choice?

Sephiroth grins, pushes him away, back to the living world he's abandoned to speak with us here (he'll wake up, but he won't scream). —I don't think so, he answers matter-of-factly, watching him fade away (TV reception is just terrible in this place). —But we'll see eventually, won't we?

Yes. We will.

_Slowly, slowly, we will get there, _he said._ Yes, it is hard. Yes, it is painful. But what cannot be removed becomes lighter with time. We are not lost._

* * *

In the church there's a new card a day old that nobody will ever see. It hides in the centre of the flowerbed, where no one will walk for fear of disturbing the holy ground. It's been carefully scribed; the message and handwriting practised to perfection to avoid marring in any way the emotion it contains, though time and rain will eventually fade and smudge the ink. It says, 'I thought you said you were coming back?'

* * *

It ended like this: There is a boy. A pale, washed out thing, with eyes sharp as broken glass but he's the one standing. Under the relentless hammer of the god he has been beaten and broken and remade and toughened until he killed the god. Now he is empty, a shell to pour dreams into, but that's okay, because this is the end, and who needs heroes after the curtain has fallen?

Or maybe it will end like this: There is a man. He's dying, slowly but terribly surely, from an illness that has no cure, or at least, not one the Planet is willing to give. He is twenty-two, twenty-three, and he has already performed the greatest event of his life. He wilts and he curls into himself and he fades away like all old heroes and when the Planet screams one day there is no one to answer.

There is a brief struggle over with in seconds, and this is how the world ends, not with a scream, not even with a whimper but with a sigh.

(—Oh. Aerith whispers. —Oh no.

Sephiroth casts a negligent smile our way. —You like to say things with flowers, he says. The glitter in his eyes is the glow of mako, not sanity. —Catch, he says, and throws a bouquet over his shoulder to Aerith as he walks away. White roses and bindweed, mourning and dead hope. If he could have set the fields on fire, he would have.

Basic mathematics. Jenova + Sephiroth remnant equals...?)

I lied. There is a way out.

* * *

(_—Promise me you'll do this_, Sephiroth said, as he sat at the well in the centre of Nibelheim, drank deep of the fountain of despair, the waters of ice and poison. —_Promise me you won't give in. Promise me you'll never let this happen again. Promise me you'll kill me._

—_Promise me this_.)

Like a fool, Cloud promised.

* * *

A/N: 1. This whole mess is apparently what happens when I listen to Enya on repeat. -eyes it weirdly-

2. This is what Sephiroth actually did for the majority of this fic:

Sephiroth: -stares at Cloud- (is quite possibly planning to kill him; may just be simply irritated that such a worthless individual killed him)

Cloud: -angsts, mopes, and other such various synonyms for being a total killjoy-

Sephiroth: -stares-

Cloud: -starts to worry-

Sephiroth: -staaaare-

Cloud: -starts trying to hide underneath the bed… does he have a bed? Possibly.-

Sephiroth: -throws rocks, pens, swords and one-liners at him-


End file.
